PART 3: THE INTERCEPTOR PROJECT
If you've haven't been to the Very Large Array near Magdalena, New Mexico, do yourself a favor and make the pilgrimage. Even if you aren't a science, space or technology buff and know nothing about radio astronomy, the Hydrogen Line, or astrophysics you'll undoubtedly stand and stare in awe of these magnificent human technological achievement invented to broaden man's knowledge of the Universe.
I've made the trip many times, each time, taking like-minded friends, fellow writers, photographers and colleagues and it never fails to impress. The VLA has been featured in many commercials and feature films like Contact and 2010: The Year We Make Contact, all movies based on science's view of how mankind will definitively prove that we are not alone in the universe. Both favorites of mine.
But if you travel a hundred or so miles south of the VLA, you will find those who would think that as impressive as the VLA technology is, it's a huge waste of money because just north of Roswell in 1947, to them, first contact had already happened.
Based on the memory of our sighting in Ohio (in 1964) and what I learned after talking to some of the key people in Roswell (I will expand on that later) the best place to look for definitive proof was not by aiming an array of huge antennas at the star-filled spot in the sky, betting it all on the one in a trillion year chance that you might be able to detect an infinitesimally weak signal from out of the distant and noisy cosmic ether.
I deduced that if the Roswell legend was real, I would have exponentially better odds by listening to the communications of humans. I know it sounds counterintuitive but if extraterrestrial beings were piloting craft through our skies, it was more likely (than not) someone was talking about it on a radio.
My life such as it is, in the early 1980s I was a working student, paying for classes, rent, to my mother, buying gas for my car and thusly affording expensive multi-band radios wasn't exactly feasible.
As such my personal pet project was put on the back burner. Besides, I was a photography major and purchasing a decent 35mm camera and lenses and paying for film only resulted with more month at the end of my money. If it wasn't for my mom, I wouldn't have finished my education.
I got a job at a local department store selling cameras and electronics. I was personable, knowledgeable and a good salesman. My salary paid the bills, but there were other bonuses as well. After a year I was eligible for a 15 percent employee discount. Better photographic gear was my first priority but obtaining the radio gear was always in the back of my mind.
Since the divorce (and the child support payments to my mother were meager) I still had two minor bothers living at home) my ever creative mother came up with ideas to stretch our limited dollars.
She became (as I called her) the queen of garage sales. Every Saturday morning, my mother and I would get up early and with the local newspaper classified section in hand we'd hit the neighborhoods looking for things we needed as a family, clothes and furniture but rare occasions I found things that I wanted, like used stereo equipment, books and vintage all band radios.
Yes, they weren't exactly state of the art, mostly cast-off broken equipment from the 60s but it was a start.
By going to the college library and thumbing through the Amateur Radio Relay League annual publication, I would find the technical knowledge I needed to get them in working shape, another skill that would serve me well in the future.
Although I could get the garage sale gear to work well, what I could monitor was limited by the era of technology they came from, which meant a lot of late night knob twiddling sessions and log books filled with notes, the tuning window marked with grease pencil so I could mark on the band-spread (where on the dial I had found any stations of interest) but dealing with un-precise analog radios that had the tendency to drift off frequency was frustrating. Although it opened up parts of the radio spectrum previously out of reach to me, finding anything of value was a miss and hit affair. I likened it to figuring out the plot of a novel with every third page missing.
Another bonus came through my photographic studies. The college had a job board and If I was quick I could snag a gig, shooting a wedding or family portrait session. Those paid much better than my work-a-day job and I grabbed as many of those as my time allowed.
More disposable income meant more gear. Soon I had graduated from vintage department store radios made by Westinghouse and Sears, to actual high-tech multi-channel scanning receivers coupled to sensitive antenna systems mounted on the roof of our small home.
We moved often. Sometimes we couldn't make rent and would get kicked out by the landlord but sometimes this would turn out to be a good thing.
One house we moved to was a fixer-upper but it was fairly big. Although it needed a lot of work which, which I was more than happy to do, it also meant I would have my own room for a make-shift radio room and a photography studio including my own personal darkroom.
It took me a bout a year to fix everything up and with my own home studio my income increased.
Once out of school and having got my associates degree, I was basically stuck in that place between what you went to school to be and the hard reality of being it. There weren't many photographic studios in our town and I was reluctant to leave a job with a steady paycheck which helped support us all. A home studio was a good intermediate step. I had a good job but on the side, I also had my own business as a photographer, but it was either feat or famine . The home studio did have a plus side. It was a good way to meet pretty girls.
Although I rarely dated, mostly because I wasn't what on the list of what the ladies looked for in a suitor. I started losing my hair when I was 18 and it hadn't stopped,, I also still lived at home and worked all the time.
Since high-school I had shed my shy persona and adopted a outgoing, funny and A-type personality and I was well liked, but the women weren't exactly lining up to meet me.
I soon learned the women I did meet only wanted me for my photographic skills and how I could make them look as they pictured themselves. Glamour shots were hot at the time and I was good at it. Word spread and soon I was working most weekends. I dated a few but most of them were pretty but vain and I wasn't attracted to that. To me smart and creative was sexy. They also had to be okay with my geeky side and understand there were many times I just needed to be alone with my thoughts. I had no long term relationships.
When I did date for longer periods it was with slightly older women who had grown past their self-centered view of a life or needing constant affirmation and (or) seeking men of financial substance. I had fun but nothing stuck as my personal passions were leading me elsewhere.
As radio monitoring technology improved and I had more to spend on radios for the Interceptor Project came an unexpected bonus. With my expertise growing, one of things I became was an expert in was monitoring the police frequencies. Although I knew I would most likely not find my answers there, listening to law enforcement and emergency communications was not only great entertainment and informative. It also paved a way to my future career and would cement my reputation as the uber-scanner hound. If it was happening locally chances were high I knew about it. I became a news-tipper for hire in a competitive news market and with that came more money.
By the early eighties digital technology was in it's infancy and new radio monitoring equipment was available that would let me scan hundreds and then thousands of frequencies at a time. No longer was I limited by buying a $5 a piece crystals at Radio Shack to monitor a single frequency.
Early on I decided to approach my Interceptor Project in a methodical way. I emulated the techniques used by government entities like the NSA and NRO. Everything was recorded on cassette tapes through a device I built to activate a cassette recorder only when a signal was received. I'd play it back compressing the day's recording onto one 45 minute tape. Listening for key words helped.
However, most of my listening was real time. My ear got so good at monitoring the police bands that I could recognize the voices of certain police officers something I still can to this day such as the Special Crimes or SWAT commanders. I had also cracked the esoteric police codes (not just the published 10 code) and became an expert on the police hierarchy.
After logging hundreds of hours of monitored communications, I could sense when something newsworthy on almost a subconscious level. The scanning radios could be playing at low level in the background layered below the sounds of every day life and yet my discerning (and by now well-trained) ear could somehow pick chaos out off all that ambient noise and routine police radio traffic.
As steady income increased both did my and my families lifestyle changed for the better. My mother was able to work part time and went back to school, getting her degree in business administration that resulted in her getting a great job as an executive secretary at a local paving company.
Not long after that my brothers came of age and moved out to start their adult lives. Two got married. Me? I was in no hurry. I had things I wanted to accomplish first.
As for myself, I worked for almost a decade at the newspaper as a photographer and I loved my job.
They called me "Johnny on the spot" and the police became used to me being present at almost every crime scene. I once arrived at two separate murder scenes before the police did and for a few minutes I became a suspect. As it would turn out we had a local serial killer who was responsible for them both, he was tried and executed many years later.
Still, all the while (and with better radio gear) my love affair with "listening to the wires sing" only grew. I read everything I could get my hands on to better my communications skills. At the time there were still a few tantalizing parts of the radio spectrum that were off limits to mere citizens like myself and that made me only more determined to find a way to monitor them.
One was the UHF military aviation band located between 225 and 400 MHz just above the police and business radio bands. That and another military communications band (140 MHz to 145 MHz) were blocked out on consumer off-the-shelf communications gear.
These "forbidden" bands became my radio monitoring obsession. On these band could be heard the communications between military aircraft and ground stations and also the holy-grail of high-level communications coming from strategic aircraft such as nuke carrying B-52s and B-1Bs, plus the downlinks from military communications satellites, space shuttles and even Air Force One itself.
The only equipment available at the time was surplus military gear which was often way too expensive and hard to convert to domestic use with all their odd voltage requirements. They were meant to be hard-wired into military fighters and bombers and couldn't be easily domesticated. They were far from user friendly and required a different set of expertise to operate. Still, when I learned they existed they became the unicorn I had to capture.
In the early 80s about the only source for current radio hobbyist information was a magazine known as Monitoring Times. It was by chance I found one at a local newsstand. In the beginning it was not very thick and in tabloid form. It's content varied from list s of frequencies to reviews of new equipment, how to build your own antennas for improved reception and the stuff like that. It was published by Grove Enterprises, a firm out of Brasstown, South Carolina.
They also manufactured a line of antennas and other devices built to enhance the radio hobbyist experience.
It seems now inevitable that I would become a writer for M.T. It started with me sending in lists of frequencies and then evolved into a monthly column and feature articles on a variety of radio related subjects.
My column, "The Fed File" (one I wrote under a pen name because it usually contained frequency information on federal agencies such as the FBI and DEA) was popular. Even though the source material I drew from was derived from frequency allocations tables published by the Federal Communications Commission, I'm sure it ruffled the feathers at three letter agencies, but everything I wrote about was open sourced and (or) as result of my radio monitoring and I made it a point of pointing that out. My guess is that they thought no one had the smarts to correlate the data and then actually monitor their communications. Later I would write for Popular Communications magazines after getting fired from Monitoring Times for missing a deadline. My mother died and not only was I mourning her loss but was busy with her estate but had little interest in monitoring anything. I was just as well because they were putting pressure on me to dial back the clandestine aspect of my articles, such as the origin of numbers stations and how to monitor federal government communications.
Although it didn't pay much writing about communications did give me a chance to write, meet many interesting people with the same interest. Not only that but manufactures would send me new monitoring equipment to review and write about. My writings were popular (as opposed to dry articles about calibrating antenna impedance)and I was rapidly becoming an underground success. As such If I asked a manufacturer about test-driving a new piece of equipment from their ever expanding catalog, they usually sent it to me to review, One black box would open up a the elusive military bands for me which would become my favorite action band to search. It was called the "Grove Scanverter" and that the magic mix of semiconductor chips would down-convert the UHF military band down on a frequency band my scanners could already readily receive.
Soon I was monitoring a whole radio band that had eluded me. It was fascinating stuff and I didn't hesitate to write about it in the pages of M.T.
Although my feature stories on what I was monitoring caused some P.R. problems for Monitoring Times, they also generated sales. Most of my reporting ended up as cover stories and as a result I developed a following of sorts made up of a mix of tech-nerds, military intelligence types and technology writers.
One of the most controversial topics was the my reporting on what was going on inside restricted flight test ranges such as Area 51 and the White Sands Missile Range. When the F-117 was still under development and classified secret, I wrote a piece on an intercept I had made about a series of radio communications revolving around a crash of one of the prototypes in California.
On an HF (shortwave) a radio phone patch was placed by a Lockheed technician describing to his company the wreckage (from the crash site) and he stressed the need for more security. Apparently the "test article" had augered-in and resulting crash had caused classified radar absorbent material to be spread over a wide area.
That report and others, including the accidental sinking of a Soviet nuclear submarine and a sighting of a even more secret flying triangular aircraft (and another known as "the Pulser") would come to the attention of the national media and as a result I'd come to contact other "Interceptors" (other radio geeks like me) that I never knew existed. Some would become life-long friends and one of those would place me firmly on the road to unraveling Roswell.
UP NEXT - PART 4 - THE INTERCEPTORS
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