At a small solar observatory tucked
away in the woods of a national forest here, scientists and other personnel
were commanded last week to leave at once. A week later, the facility remains
vacant, and no one is willing to say why.
The mysterious and lengthy
evacuation, in a state known for secretive military testing and a suspected UFO
crash, has spawned a wealth of speculation.
Did the researchers spot something
extraterrestrial? Was the solar telescope hacked by a foreign power and
deployed to spy on, say, the state's missile testing range? Or is there an
innocuous explanation, suppressed only because of corporate and government
resistance to transparency?
On Friday, the entrance to the
National Solar Observatory was blocked by yellow crime scene tape and two
security guards, who said even they had been kept in the dark. The guards, from
Red Rock Security & Patrol in Las Cruces, New Mexico, didn't give their
names, but said it was the first day the company was guarding the entrance and
only the "director and an assistant" were allowed in. There was no
obvious sign of law enforcement activity.
"We don't know anything. We're
just as curious as anyone else," one guard said.
A spokeswoman for the nonprofit
group that runs the facility said the organization was addressing a
"security issue," but would offer no additional information, other
than, "I can tell you it definitely wasn't aliens." She said Friday
the facility "will remain closed until further notice." Neither the
FBI - which was spotted on the premises around the time of the evacuation - nor
those who worked at the facility would tell local law enforcement what had
happened, said Otero County Sheriff Benny House.
"They wouldn't give us any
details," House said. "I've got ideas, but I don't want to put them
out there. That's how bad press or rumours get started, and it'll cause paranoia,
or I might satisfy everybody's mind and I might be totally off base."
Unlike some of New Mexico's other
research facilities, the solar observatory in Sunspot is not usually shrouded
in such secrecy.
The facility - in the Lincoln
National Forest in the southern part of the state - is open to the public, and
the scientists who work there offer guided tours of the site, said James
McAteer, a professor at New Mexico State University and director of the Sunspot
Solar Observatory consortium. When they're not doing that, they use a special
telescope and other instruments to study the sun. There are homes on the site
where staff members live.
The Sunspot observatory sits at
more than 9,000 feet and is part of a larger astronomy research facility on the
site. The adjacent Apache Point Observatory, a collection of telescopes about a
half-mile away, was operating as normal on Friday, with about a dozen cars
parked outside.
House, the sheriff, said that just
before 10 a.m. on Sept. 6, staff at the Sunspot facility called to report they
were "evacuating the building," and asked if deputies could assist.
He said a sergeant and a deputy were dispatched and told upon arrival that the
FBI had been there earlier.
But neither staff, nor the bureau,
would explain why the facility had to be vacated, House said. He said a
volunteer fire chief claimed the FBI had told him there had been a
"credible threat" but would provide no details.
The sheriff's office, House said,
saw no evidence of a threat, and left after a few hours.
"We tried to find out the
threat and what their concerns were," House said. "They wouldn't
identify anything. They were pretty hush mouthed about it."
McAteer said his consortium assigns
four researchers to the facility, although the Association of Universities for
Research in Astronomy (AURA), another consortium, manages the buildings and
other infrastructure with another four or five people.
That consortium, McAteer said, had
ordered the site vacated, providing no other reason than a "security"
issue. He said the researchers did not spot anything in the sun to necessitate
them leaving, nor were they aware of any scientific reason - such as an anomaly
in the data they were collecting - for doing so.
"My people, we didn't do the
evacuation, and we do the science," McAteer said.
The property manager also came in
to the post office on the facility and asked the woman working there to leave,
but gave no indication why that was necessary, said Rod Spurgeon, a Postal
Service spokesman. Spurgeon said post office operations have continued at the
nearby Cloudcroft facility.
Kinsey Featherston, a spokeswoman
for Rep. Stevan Pearce, R-N.M., said the congressman's office had reached out
to the FBI and were told "it is an ongoing investigation."
"We will continue monitoring
the situation, but at this time, we have no information," she said.
An FBI spokeswoman declined to
comment, referring questions about the matter to the consortium that manages
the buildings. Shari Lifson, an AURA spokeswoman, said in a statement that her
group was "addressing a security issue" and had "decided to
temporarily vacate the facility as a precautionary measure." She said they
were "working with the proper authorities on this issue," although
she declined to specify who those authorities were.
Lifson also declined to specify the
security issue, other than to dispute the idea aliens were involved.
The solar observatory is about a 2
1/2-hour drive from Roswell, New Mexico, the site of a now infamous crash in
1947 that the Air Force later claimed was an experiment designed to detect
Soviet nuclear activity by monitoring sound waves. The incident sparked so much
interest that there is now a UFO museum in the city.
Sunspot and Apache Point offer
scenic views of the Tularosa Basin, which includes two sensitive military
sites, including Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands Missile Range. A
public affairs officer at White Sands said there was no testing or other
activity at the range that would have prompted the evacuation in Sunspot.
As of Friday, the observatory was
still shuttered, although McAteer said the researchers were ready to return
"as soon as possible." The observatory even seemed to embrace the
interest in the mysterious evacuation, writing on its website, "With the
excitement this closure has generated, we hope you will come and visit us when
we do reopen, and see for yourself the services we provide for science and
public outreach in heliophysics."
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