Boing Boing is featuring a great audience-funded piece of feature journalism here from Josh Ellis:
“Dark Miracle: Trinity, the Manhattan Project, and the Birth of the Atomic Age.”
He asked folks to pay for his trip to Alamagordo on one of the two days a year that they open the site to the public.
As a former visitor to another nuclear weapons test site (though univited!) I can relate to the totally weird vibe these places attract. In 1983 four of us drove and hiked across 50 miles of desert to get to Yucca Flat at the Nevada Test Site — the first incursion by activists into the nuclear test zone. It was a cratered moonscape of apocalyptic weirdness in itself. But to get there, we had to pass by Area 51 — beloved of UFOlogists the world over. And damned if we didn’t in fact see something strange there…
We’d chosen a route to the test site that would keep us well clear, (we had no idea what kind of security to expect out there) but we crossed one high ridge that gave us a view. There was something on the runway that none of us could make heads or tails of. A casual mention of this fact in a bar after we’d been arrested ended up finding its way into the UFO circles as “Greenpeace spotted an alien craft at Area 51.”
Well, we hadn’t. A few years later when pictures of the first Stealth Bombers were declassified, I recognised it immediately as the shape we’d seen down there at Area 51. And with the help of a UFO researcher who was a thorough fact-finder, we determined that in fact the early prototypes were being transferred from research duty at Area 51 to operational training at Nellis Air Force Base precisely during the month we were out there stopping a nuclear test.
I guess when you think about the meta-threats to human existence, UFOs and Nuclear weapons share some territory. And anything like the end of the world which the imagination can’t really grapple rationally probably ends up in that place where there are no boundries on the possible, a place I call… The Elvis Zone.
–b
Everyone who has lit a wood or coal fire and watched it burn has seen pyrolysis.
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gillo, I don’t know if aliens would vote Republican or not, but I swear that Dick Cheney is an alien. I mean, look at him… and what’s this “undisclosed location” stuff all about?
One thing that’s obvious about Republicans is that they don’t believe in the (Star Trek) “prime directive”.
Do you think Aliens would vote Republican?
Nope, never been to VeryLarge. But who needs to go looking for aliens off planet when, clearly, there are ambassadors among us. See, I’ve been to the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas and seen, yes, I swear, the Fur Piano (I think it’s mink…)
No earthly imagination could have created such an artifact.
😉
–b
Ohh, Brian, I’ll have to tell you about my trips (yes, plural) to the Trinity Site sometime! There are too many details for a blog comment, but the reason I had multiple trips was for nerd curiosity (the first time), and the next two times were to show non-Americans where a WMD was born.
It’s so eerie there. I love the incredible NM desert (hey, it’s where I’m from), but suddenly you’re on an Air Force base, and there are MPs checking your car for… what? Anti-nuclear activists? *snicker*
I also took my husband to the science museum in Los Alamos. It’s equally scary in an organized sort of way. It creeped us out so much that we got kind of silly. After stuff like this (that’s my husband hugging the Fat Man bomb mock-up), and worse, I’m surprised they didn’t throw us out. We got pretty noisy.
Man, I have some badass photos to show you, and stories to tell. They’re not as cool as yours, though (hell, I’d have given anything to have been at the Nevada Site with you guys that day).
Best blog ever, Brian!
p.s. Ever been to the VLA in New Mexico? You know, speaking of aliens and all 😉