I was 15 years old in 2004 when I have guessed the existence of that program :)

I was reading a scientific magazine article about the planed return of the Genesis spacecraft’s samples. They were writing about how the probe will float back to Earth under a parachute and a helicopter will catch it mid—air. That plan sounded absolutely bonkers crazy to me and I would have assumed they needed a long process of trial drops to practice this stunt, but the documented evidence shown that they were quite non-chalant about it. Almost as if they have done such things previously. But since there were no public evidence of prior art I assumed some classified spy stuff was what gave them the experience needed to be confident about the skill. (This was 7 years before the declassification of the existence of the KH-9 program)