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Matt Zapotosky
A national security reporter covering the Department of Justice
SUNSPOT, N.M. – In a small solar observatory nestled in the woods of a national forest, scientists and other staff members were given the order last week to leave. A week later, the facility remains vacant and no one is willing to say why.
The mysterious and long evacuation, in a state known for its secret military tests and its eventual UFO crash, has sparked much speculation.
Did the researchers spot something extraterrestrial? Has the solar telescope been hacked by a foreign power and deployed to spy on, for example, the range of state missile tests? Or is there a harmless explanation, suppressed only because of corporate and government resistance to transparency?
[An alien cyberattack? As if we didn’t have enough to worry about.]
On Friday, the entrance to the National Solar Observatory was blocked by a strip of yellow crime scenes and by two security guards, who said they had been kept in the dark. The guards at Red Rock Security & Patrol in Las Cruces, NM, did not give their names, but said it was the first day the company guarded the entrance and that only the "director and an assistant" were allowed to enter. no obvious sign of police activity.
"We do not know anything. We are as curious as anyone, "said a guard.
The Apache Point Observatory and the nearby Sunspot National Observatory offer panoramic views of the Tularosa Basin in New Mexico, which includes two military bases, the White Sands Inlet and Holloman Air Force Base. (Robert Moore / For the Washington Post)
A non-profit group spokesperson who manages the facility said the organization was addressing a "security problem" but would not offer any additional information except: "I can tell you that it was certainly not aliens. will remain closed until further notice. Neither the FBI – who was spotted in the premises at the time of the evacuation – nor those who worked at the facility told the local law enforcement officials what had happened, said Sheriff Benny House.
"They would not give us any details," said House. "I have ideas, but I do not want to broadcast them. That's why the press or the rumors start to be bad, and that will cause paranoia, or I could satisfy everybody's mind and I could be totally out of the grassroots. "
Unlike some other research facilities in New Mexico, the Sunspot Solar Observatory is generally not surrounded by this secret.
James McAteer, a professor at the State University of New Mexico and director of the University of Mexico, said the facility, open to the public in the Lincoln National Forest, in the south of the state, offers guided tours of the site. Sunspot Solar Observatory Consortium. When they do not, they use a special telescope and other instruments to study the sun. There are houses on the site where the staff members live.
The sunspot observatory sits at over 9,000 feet and is part of a larger astronomy research facility on the site. The adjacent Apache Point Observatory, a collection of telescopes located about 800 meters away, was operating normally on Friday, with a dozen cars parked outside.
House, the sheriff, said the staff of the Sunspot facility, called to "evacuate the building" just before 10 am on Sept. 6, asked if MPs could help. He stated that a sergeant and a deputy had been dispatched and informed upon their arrival that the FBI had been there earlier.
But neither the staff nor the office explain why the facility had to be vacated, House said. He stated that a volunteer fire chief had claimed that the FBI had told him that there had been a "credible threat" but that he would not provide any details.
The sheriff's office, said House, saw no evidence of threat and left after a few hours.
"We tried to find out the threat and what their concerns were," said House. "They would not recognize anything. They were very calm about it. "
[[[[How will humanity react to extraterrestrial life? Psychologists have predictions.]
McAteer said his consortium was assigning four researchers to the facility, although the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), another consortium, manages buildings and other infrastructure with four or five other people.
This consortium, said McAteer, had ordered that the site be released, providing no other reason than a "security" problem. He said the researchers had seen nothing in the sun to force them to leave, and that they had no scientific reason – such as an anomaly in the data they collected – to do so.
"My people, we have not done the evacuation, and we are doing science," McAteer said.
The building manager also arrived at the institution's post office and asked the woman who was working there to leave, but did not say why it was necessary, said Rod Spurgeon, spokesperson for the office. postal service. Spurgeon said post office operations continued at the nearby Cloudcroft facility.
Kinsey Featherston, spokesperson for Representative Stevan Pearce (NRM), said the Congressman's office had contacted the FBI and had been informed that "the investigation was underway".
"We will continue to monitor the situation, but for now, we have no information," she said.
An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment, referring questions to the consortium that manages the buildings. Shari Lifson, a spokeswoman for AURA, said in a statement that her group "was tackling a security problem" had "decided to temporarily leave the facility as a precautionary measure." "Although she refused to specify who these authorities were.
Lifson also refused to spell out the security problem except to challenge the idea that strangers were involved.
The solar observatory is about two and a half hours drive from Roswell, New Brunswick. The site of an accident now infamous in 1947 was used by the air force to detect Soviet nuclear activity by monitoring sound waves. House said his deputies had spotted a Black Hawk helicopter in the area at the time the building was evacuated – though he noted that this is not uncommon.
Sunspot and Apache Point offer panoramic views of the Tularosa Basin, which includes two sensitive military sites, including Holloman Air Force Base and the White Sands Missile. A White Sands public affairs official said there were no beach-scale trials or other activities that would have caused the evacuation to Sunspot.
[The military keeps encountering UFOs. Why doesn’t the Pentagon care?]
On Friday, the observatory was still closed, though McAteer said the researchers were ready to return "as quickly as possible." The observatory even seemed to be interested in this mysterious evacuation by writing on its website generated, we hope you will come visit us when we reopen and that we will see for yourself the services we offer in scientific and public awareness in heliophysics.
Zapotosky reported from Washington. Shane Harris and Joby Warrick contributed to this report from Washington.
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