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posted by takyon on Thursday September 13 2018, @08:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the Nibiru-detection dept.

The Alamogordo Daily News reports:

The Sunspot Observatory is temporarily closed due to a security issue at the facility that's located 17 miles south of Cloudcroft in the Sacramento Mountains Friday, an Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) spokeswoman Shari Lifson said.

"The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy who manages the facility is addressing a security issue at this time," Lifson said. "We have decided to vacate the facility at this time as precautionary measure. It was our decision to evacuate the facility." She said she cannot comment on the specifics of the security issue.

[...] Otero County Sheriff Benny House said the Otero County Sheriff's Office was asked to standby. "The FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] is refusing to tell us what's going on," House said. "We've got people up there (at Sunspot) that requested us to standby while they evacuate it. Nobody would really elaborate on any of the circumstances as to why. The FBI were up there. What their purpose was nobody will say."

He said he has a lot of unanswered questions about what occurred at Sunspot. "But for the FBI to get involved that quick and be so secretive about it, there was a lot of stuff going on up there," House said. "There was a Blackhawk helicopter, a bunch of people around antennas and work crews on towers but nobody would tell us anything."

Why would the FBI order a sunspot research facility closed, but be unable (or unwilling) to give a reason?

Also at Popular Mechanics, Vice, and Gizmodo.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:58PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:58PM (#734562)

    Or they found a large underground cavern (possibly Cold War related or dungeon full of bodies) when digging down for whatever reason. The cavern may extend towards the post office and may be prone or ready to collapse (possibly due to subsidence from the digging).

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday September 14 2018, @11:47AM (3 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 14 2018, @11:47AM (#734788)

    Holloman AFB is close so no idea why you'd intentionally put it under an existing observatory. And yes the observatory was founded and in use at the dawn of the cold war, its unlikely cold war nuclear training flights accidentally dropped a H-bomb under the telescope foundation and they finally got around to noticing.

    Its remotely possible they're pencil whipping something that was installed there in 1960 and forgotten about, perhaps a classified radar monitor station, and once they rip the monitoring gear out they can pencil whip the decommissioning paperwork and everything can go back to normal. Pretty unlikely, but smells very likely military. The guy who was assigned the task of declassifying the project signed off in the 70s and died in the 90s so they "can't" pencil whip it; I could see it as realistic fiction. Some Chinese national "astronomer" working for the uni stationed at the scope site sees some rusty half century old thing, tweets his family back home or sneaks a pix for good boy points back home, FBI intercepts, someone in .mil does the ohshit.jpg face, next thing you know there's crime scene tape up and bulldozers everywhere until some mysterious box thats been locked and forgotten about since 1960 disappears.

    • (Score: 2) by Hartree on Friday September 14 2018, @09:05PM (2 children)

      by Hartree (195) on Friday September 14 2018, @09:05PM (#735060)

      Close, but it's more likely they were looking for something relatively new that was "placed" at Sunspot by someone. It's a nice high place with line of sight to both Holloman and White Sands Missile Range. And it gives absolutely iron clad scientific reasons for a given foreign national to be there on a regular basis.

      Remember, the FBI does counterintel work.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Friday September 14 2018, @09:49PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 14 2018, @09:49PM (#735091)

        I agree with you completely, with a side dish of it had to be at an observatory because the general public is used to seeing inexplicable equipment observing things at an observatory; which is why this all didn't go down at some random hiking trail or parking lot.

      • (Score: 1) by exaeta on Monday September 17 2018, @01:20AM

        by exaeta (6957) on Monday September 17 2018, @01:20AM (#735809) Homepage Journal

        This actually might make the most sense of any explanation so far.

        --
        The Government is a Bird