PART 3: THE INTERCEPTOR PROJECT

PART 3

THE INTERCEPTOR PROJECT

PART 3

THE INTERCEPTOR PROJECT

If you’ve never been to the Very Large Array near Magdalena, New Mexico, do yourself a favor and go. Even if you don’t care much about science or space and know nothing about radio astronomy, you’ll still end up staring at those giant antennas in quiet amazement. It’s one of those places that reminds you what humans can build when we’re trying to understand the universe.

I’ve visited many times, usually dragging along friends, fellow writers, photographers and anyone else who’d appreciate it. It impresses me every time.

The VLA has shown up in plenty of commercials and in movies like Contact and 2010: The Year We Make Contact—stories built around the idea that we’ll someday prove we aren’t alone. Both favorites of mine.

But drive a hundred miles south and you’ll meet people who think the VLA is a waste of money. Their logic is simple: if first contact already happened north of Roswell in 1947, why spend billions aiming antennas at the stars? If that event were real, the better bet wouldn’t be listening for faint signals from deep space—it would be listening to us. If something alien was flying around overhead, someone down here was probably talking about it on the radio.

In the early 1980s, though, my world was smaller. I was a working student. I worried about tuition, rent (paid to my mom), gas for my car and not much else. Even though the idea of scanning the airwaves had grabbed me, buying good multiband radios wasn’t in the budget.

So the whole Interceptor idea had to wait. I was a photography major, and what money I had went toward a decent 35mm camera and film. Without my mom’s help I never would’ve finished school.

I worked at a local department store selling cameras and electronics. I was good at it, and the paycheck kept us afloat. After a year I got a 15 percent employee discount. Better photo gear came first, but the radios were always in the back of my mind.

Money was tight at home. My mom was raising four sons on meager child support, so she did whatever she could to stretch a dollar. Saturdays were garage-sale days. We’d grab the classifieds and drive around looking for clothes and furniture. Every so often I’d find something I wanted—old stereo gear, books, or, if I was lucky, a beat-up all-band radio.

They weren’t pretty. Most were broken relics from the 60s. But you start where you can. Fixing them forced me to learn everything: circuits, alignment, antennas, the whole lot. As far as I knew, there were no other “Interceptors” out there. Plenty of hobbyists, sure. But nobody with the same goal. So I taught myself.

The college library had Amateur Radio Relay League manuals, and those books became my classroom. Bit by bit I got the old equipment working, though the limitations of that era meant long nights of knob-twisting and pages of handwritten logs. I’d mark dials with a grease pencil when I found something worth checking again.

The radios drifted off frequency and drove me crazy, but they opened parts of the spectrum I’d never heard before. And I learned that the antenna mattered as much as the receiver. Telescoping whip antennas worked for local signals, but not for long-distance listening. I dove into antenna design. After enough trial and error, I could hear stations from around the world. My mom didn’t mind the strange metal contraptions on the roof, though the neighbors complained. Eventually I figured out how to hide the antennas so no one noticed.

Photography gigs helped too. The college job board was a gold mine for weddings and portraits. Those paid far better than the store did. Add in classes, work, late-night radio sessions and weekend shoots, and I barely slept. Youth lets you get away with that. Age doesn’t. These days I lean on digital recorders to save my sanity.

As money trickled in, I upgraded my radios. I moved from old Sears and Westinghouse models to real scanning receivers with real sensitivity. But every time I built a proper monitoring setup, we’d end up moving again. Sometimes landlords kicked us out. Sometimes we left for better places. One house was a fixer-upper, but big enough that I finally got a room for a radio shack and a small home studio with my own darkroom. It took a year to get it into shape, but once it was done, my photo income grew—and so did my radio budget.

After earning my associate degree, I found myself stuck between what I’d trained for and what I could actually do. There weren’t many studios in town, and I didn’t want to leave a job that helped support my family. So the home studio became my middle ground. It also became a way to meet women, though I didn’t date much. Losing my hair at eighteen, living at home and working constantly didn’t help.

People who knew me understood that I lived in my head. I wasn’t autistic, but I needed long stretches alone to think and work. I’d shed my shy side in high school and become outgoing and funny, but I didn’t party, I couldn’t dance and I hated bars—not exactly prime dating material.

Most women wanted me for my photography skills. Glamour shots were popular, and I was good at them. Word spread, and weekends filled up. I dated a few of the women I photographed, but most were more interested in looking beautiful than in anything deeper. I preferred smart, creative women who were fine with my nerdy habits and my need for solitude. Longer relationships tended to be with women a little older and past the stage of needing constant attention. Still, nothing stuck. My mind kept drifting back to radios.

As scanners improved, so did my skills. I got good at listening to police frequencies. I knew I wouldn’t find aliens there, but the chatter was fascinating and ended up guiding me toward a future I hadn’t expected: news. I became known as the guy who always knew what was happening. News directors put me on speed dial. I tipped them off about fires, standoffs, crashes—anything big. Soon I was making money from it.

By the early 80s, digital tech was still young, but the new scanners were incredible. No more buying single-frequency crystals at Radio Shack. Microprocessor scanners could hold hundreds of channels and sweep big chunks of spectrum with a single search command.

I tried to approach the Interceptor Project methodically, the way I imagined the NSA or NRO would. I built a device that recorded only when a signal broke squelch. At the end of the day I’d condense hours of audio onto a single cassette. But most listening was still live. After thousands of hours, I could pick out the voices of specific police officers and decipher the unofficial codes they used. I could sense when something unusual was happening long before it hit the news.

I’d often show up at major incidents before anyone else, camera in hand. Eventually the local paper started buying my photos, then offered me a job. I accepted without hesitation.

For the first time, I was getting paid to combine my two obsessions.

As things stabilized, life improved. My mom went back to school, earned a business degree and landed a solid job. My brothers grew up and moved on. Two got married. I stayed focused on my work and my projects.

Eventually I married a woman who worked at the same newspaper. She tolerated my radio obsession, because it helped pay the bills. 

I spent nearly a decade at the paper. The police called me “Johnny on the spot.” Twice I reached murder scenes before the officers did and, for a few tense moments, became the prime suspect. Later we learned those crimes were the work of a serial killer. He was caught and eventually executed.

Through all of this, I kept pushing into the parts of the spectrum that weren’t supposed to be accessible. The UHF military aviation band—225 to 400 MHz—was the one that mattered most, along with another military block around 140 to 145 MHz. Consumer radios couldn’t tune them. That alone made me want them more.

Surplus military gear existed, but it was expensive, hard to power and a pain to operate. Still, I wanted access.

Around then I discovered Monitoring Times, a thin tabloid magazine from Grove Enterprises in Brasstown, South Carolina. It covered frequencies, equipment reviews and antenna projects. Grove also made gear for hobbyists. It was only a matter of time before I started writing for them.

It began with me sending in lists of frequencies. Soon I had a monthly column and feature articles. I wrote “The Fed File” under a pen name because it focused on federal agency communications. All of it was open-source—FCC allocations and what I captured off the air—but I’m sure it annoyed some people in Washington.

Later I wrote for Popular Communications after Monitoring Times fired me for missing a deadline. My mom had just died, and grief pulled me away from everything, including radios. MT also wanted me to tone down the clandestine topics, like number stations and federal monitoring, so maybe it was time to move on.

Writing didn’t pay much, but it let me meet people who shared my obsessions. Manufacturers sent me radios to review. If I asked to test something new, it usually showed up on my doorstep. One device, the Grove Scanverter, finally opened the UHF military band to me by shifting it down to frequencies my scanners could handle.

That changed everything. I started hearing air-to-air refueling missions, fighter training, Air Force One traffic, shuttle downlinks and even communications from strategic aircraft responsible for nuclear forces. My stories caused headaches for MT, but they sold magazines. Many became cover pieces. I gained a following—tech people, military listeners, journalists.

Some of the most controversial pieces came from monitoring restricted test ranges like Area 51 and White Sands. When the F-117 was still classified, I intercepted a radio-phone patch from a Lockheed tech describing the crash of a prototype. He talked about scattered stealth materials and the need to lock down the area, secure every fragment and even seed the ground with debris from normal aircraft before the press arrived. Most people using HF phone patches never considered that anyone else could hear them.

Reports like that—and others, including the sinking of a Soviet sub and sightings of odd triangular aircraft—ended up reaching national media. Those stories introduced me to other Interceptors I never knew existed. Some became lifelong friends. One of them eventually put me on the path toward unraveling Roswell.

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