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 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 think that as impressive as the VLA technology is, it's a huge waste of money because just north of Roswell in 1947, first contact had already happened.
If first contact already happened in 1947, why look for definitive proof was not by aiming an array of huge antennas at the star-filled spot in the sky? Doing the math it seems that listening for E.T. to call is one in a trillion year chance, dependent on intercepting an infinitesimally weak signal from out of the distant and noisy cosmic ether.
If indeed the Roswell legend was real, I stands to reason one 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 was, in the early 1980s, was that of a working student. My main concerns were paying for classes, paying rent, to my mother, buying gas for my car. Despite my epiphany and my desire to scan the bands, affording expensive multi-band radios wasn't exactly a priority.
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) resulted with more month at the end of my money. If it wasn't for my mom, I wouldn't have finished my education. God bless her!
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 my mom's divorce from my father and with child support payments to my mother being meager, times were tough. At that time still had three minor bothers living at home plus myself. 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, such as clothes and furniture but on 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 you have to start somewhere. Starting from aero can sometimes be a good thing. It forces you to learn about everything and anything if you want it to work. As far as I knew, there (at the time) were no (citizen) interceptors before me. Radio hobbyists, yes but none with a specific goal in mind. I would have to educate myself.
By going to the college library and thumbing through the various Amateur Radio Relay League publications, I would find the technical knowledge I needed to get the cast-off radio gear in working shape. That was another skill that would save me money and serve me well into the future.
Although I could get the garage sale gear to work, 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. I'd mark the tuning window with grease pencil so I could mark on the dial any stations of interest.
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. In those days it was a cycle of work, rest, school, work, rest (then shooting photos on most weekends and finally topping off the late nights tuning through radio bands. When you are young, sleeping seems like a waste of time. When you are older, it's a much welcome restorative biological need, a must to keep my brain functioning. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you are an Interceptor) all those nights staying up listening to the wires sing wrecked my wake-sleep cycle, something that I still struggle with today. Now digital recording has become a godsend and enables me to both time-shift and compress my valuable monitoring sessions,
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 professionally designed sensitive antenna systems. I started building radio monitoring shacks but they never lasted long.
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 but with my own home photography studio my income increased as did my budget for modern radio gear.
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 had helped support us all.
A home studio was a good intermediate step. I also had many part-time jobs on the side, I also had my own business as a photographer, but still, sometimes it was either feast or famine. The home studio did have am unexpected plus side. It was a good way to meet pretty girls.
Although I rarely dated but not out of choice. Mostly but because I wasn't what on the list of what the young 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 living at home and working all the time, both relationship killers.
Since high-school I had shed my shy persona and adopted a outgoing, funny and A-type personality and I was well liked, but I didn't party, couldn't dance and hated bars, not exactly a fun date.
I soon learned the women I did meet usually 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 (and 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 and projects. 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 adept at 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 great entertainment and informative, and it also paved a way to my future career, news gathering. My reputation as the uber-scanner hound landed my number on the speed dial button of most the TV news directors in my city. If it was happening locally, chances were high I knew about it. I became a news-tipper for hire in a competitive news market. Another monetary stream opened up.
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 (each) 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 recalled arriving at two separate murder scenes before the police and for a few tense minutes I became the 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 ways 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 lists 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. However, 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 and 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, penning articles about communications did give me a chance to write, which I loved. Through that I met many interesting people with the same interests.
Not only that but once I made a name for myself radio receiver 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.
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) radio phone patch placed by a Lockheed technician describing to his company the wreckage (from the crash site) 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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| photo (C) Steve Douglass |
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