June 1962. An abandoned Soviet drifting ice station groans in the polar night. Two American operatives, half-frozen and hauling armfuls of secret gear, stare into a blizzard and pray they can hear engines. Their ride home isn’t a helicopter or submarine—it’s a lumbering World War II B‑17 that intends to snatch them off the ice with a balloon, a cable, and a V‑shaped hook. Miss once and they die. Hit it, and they’re yanked into the sky like human kites.

Skyhooked: The Untold Shocking True Story of Project COLDFEET and the Fulton Balloon Grab is the first full-length, blow-by-blow account of the covert mission to loot Soviet technology from Arctic Station NP‑8—and the insane extraction system that made escape possible. It’s part thriller, part engineering marvel, part meticulously sourced history, told at a white-knuckle pace.

Why risk everything on a drifting slab of ice? Because NP‑8 hid answers to questions that kept Pentagon planners awake at night: How were the Soviets listening underwater? What sonar tricks, codebooks, and transmitters were they using beneath the polar pack? The only way to know was to drop in, loot fast, and vanish before the ice—or the enemy—swallowed the evidence.

• The birth of the Skyhook: from Robert Fulton Jr.’s sketchpad to goat-slinging test flights in the desert.
• The HALO drop through Arctic darkness and the terror of landing on a maze of pressure ridges and crevasses.
• A scavenger hunt through frozen labs—snapping photos, stuffing crates, and arguing over what was worth a precious pound of lift.
• The extraction rehearsal that went wrong… and the real pickup that nearly ripped a man in half.
• The quiet debriefs, the classified memos, and the ripple effects that reached every corner of Cold War naval intelligence.
• Pop‑culture echoes—from Batman to Thunderball—that twisted truth into legend.
• Why the Skyhook faded as helicopters, tiltrotors, and satellite comms took over—and where its DNA still lives in today’s exfiltration tech.

This is not a victory parade. It’s a story of improvisation under lethal pressure: lines icing over, winches jamming, balloons whipping in gale-force winds, and men calculating lift, drag, and blood loss in real time. It’s also about the moral murk of espionage on territory that legally belonged to no one, the bureaucratic turf wars between Navy researchers and CIA cowboys, and the lingering question: What did we really gain—and what did we risk becoming to get it?

Gary Covella, Ph.D., assembles declassified cables, field reports, oral histories, and forgotten patent filings into a cinematic timeline that finally does justice to the mission’s audacity. No fluff, no pulp embellishment—just the razor-edge tension of a plan that should have failed, but didn’t.

If you crave:
— Real-life covert ops that read like technothrillers
— Engineering stunts so outrageous they seem impossible
— Meticulous research that still crackles with momentum

…then strap in. Look up. The hook is coming.

Skyhooked isn’t just the chronicle of a single mission—it’s a case study in Cold War ingenuity, a tribute to the men who hung between life and death on a nylon line, and a reminder that the truth can be far stranger than any spy novel.

Turn the page and step onto the ice. The wind is howling, the clock is ticking, and the B‑17 is already on final approach.