61–70 of 129 posts
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Its a coverup to prevent the public from learning that the sun is actually flat.
Everybody knows that, how do you think night works? It's when it spins around us and shows its back.
Edit: nice username ;)
Looks like a small sliver of the observatory is blurred on Google Maps. https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7882221,-105.8176836,349a,35...
looks ok to me, loading error?
Wouldn't surprise me if some meth manufactures found the place to be fairly empty and was operating out of one of the buildings. Only to get caught shipping product somewhere and the FBI backtracked it to the observatory.
Apparently it has “excellent views of Holloman AFB and White Sands Missile Range” ( https://reddit.com/r/SpecialAccess/comments/9f91sm/_/e5uy1fd... ) . Further down, someone says that someone claims that the Chinese were using the antenna array at the observatory to spy on missile tests at WSMR. If the place was truly low on staff then this theory may not be so far fetched.
The views of the AFB and missile range are truly excellent. Google Maps panoramic view: https://goo.gl/ckkCQc
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Heh, this is the most probable explanation yet, and it is being downed? This is a real problem in the US for anyone that hasn't had a meth lab bust in thier local hood, gated community or national/state/muni park.
This seems like a stupidly conspicuous location to setup a meth lab unless you assume that not a single person visits the facility for months at a time and no one would notice large plumes of smoke rising from it.
It took 2 years to get a blatant lab shut down on my upper middle-class street. Ex-neighbor's ex-engine mate happened to transfer from FD to our local PD precinct & made detective. He was the only reason the rat nest was disturbed.
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Other than a big telescope great for looking at things far away? I used to work in astrophysics. Telescope operators are expected not to look in certain places. Those were fun conversations. My guess is they found a spy.
What kinds of places were you told not to look? (I'm guessing you couldn't physically point it at targets on the ground, so I assume certain sections of the sky.) Who was it that was commanding you not to look?
In addition to all the NOAA licensing for imaging the ground, you need extra licenses for taking pictures of space. (it's useful, for example, to image the moon as a way of calibrating cameras & telescopes without atmospheric interference, and tracking stars is one of the most reliable ways to determine spacecraft attitude)
One of the requirements is that if we take a picture of space and there's anything moving in the picture (presumably a near-earth satellite), we delete all copies of the picture and forget we ever took it, but only after offering it for sale to the Air Force at a commercially reasonable price.
I'm sure there are additional layers on top of it, that's just the facets of it that I've been exposed to in the mandatory company-wide regulatory training.
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I'm not sure what you're implying. Because there's not a visible security presence, the Alamogordo Daily News is making this up? After law enforcement gets what they need, there's no reason to patrol the property.
> Because there's not a visible security presence, the Alamogordo Daily News is making this up? Nope. At this point, I believe that this was a fairly orderly shutdown (temporary or permanent) that wasn't communicated very well. The "FBI" and "Blackhawk helicopter" were probably federal employees removing federal property from the observatory's antenna arrays before handing it over to the university. I suppose it's po…
Also, it's really common to go overkill for training purposes.
For example, sending two F15s to go sit on the ground at an air show includes them refueling mid-air and intercepting a B52 that's also headed to the same air show so they can check those training boxes.
Sending the Navy seals to fast-rope in to an observatory and recover the federally owned gigabit switches from the telecom closet is the kind of overkill you get in the name of training.
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350 pounds (or 10 tons? Actual amount is unknown) of mercury
... as far as I know, mercury isn't a restricted product and can be shipped to your door. Here's a video of a guy flushing 240# of mercury down a toilet (NOT connected to a sewer or septic system), just to see if it was possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvVaaZ21C44 It's not exactly difficult to find industrial users of mercury, and the mercury at Sunspot is in a sealed instrument. I see no reason why the pres…
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Since subcosmos won't answer, I'll take a guess: Spy satellites.
Anyone can look at those though, they can't really hide them