I got married in the early 90s, having finally found a woman who didn't mind my eccentricities and we were compatible in the ways that we both were creatives. She was an artist who worked at the same newspaper I did. We hit it off, got hitched and suddenly I went from being a single male geek to being a husband and a step-father.
Yes- she had a 10 year old daughter who thought I was funny and I thought she was pretty great too, but I soon realized I was out of my depth when it came to raising a pre-teen girl. Once we got married, the newspaper gave us a choice. One of us had to leave due to a nepotism policy. Since I had proven I could make money free-lancing and my wife was just starting her career at the newspaper, I became a house husband.
And I totally sucked at it.
By the time my step-daughter was 15 she absolutely hated my guts, and she had the right to.
I also didn't know it at the time but I was very sick. It came on gradually and would take several years to diagnose what was wrong with me. I had extreme mood swings, ho tempered - irrational, sometimes I was hyperactive and then sometimes I'd sleep for days. When I couldn't sleep, I would stay awake and suffer from intense migraines, chest pains and was pretty close to suicidal. Unfortunately since I was the one at home, my step daughter bore the brunt of my (unknown to me then) internal malady, manifested mentally. Just what you need when you are teenage girl, a mentally unstable step-father.
Both my wife and my stepdaughter thought I had gone just bat-shit crazy. I was constantly ending up in the emergency room feeling like I was having a heart attack. Each time they couldn't find anything physically wrong with me. One doctor diagnosed me as being manic/depressive. His idea to fix me was to fill me with pills. Nothing worked and in fact it got worse. I couldn't write, photograph and felt like hammered shit most of the time. At my lowest point really felt like checking out.
But just when you think you've hit rock bottom, one day the real bottom falls out of your life. As bad as I was feeling, my mother was feeling worse.
Almost every Sunday I would take my mom to the movies. It was a given. Didn't matter what was playing, we watched it. It became our thing to do, ever since we saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Come rain or shine, feeling shitty or not, a movie always let us escape from our lives even if just for a few hours.
Then shortly after I was married she started cancelling. At first I thought it was because I had my own family and she didn't want to be thought of as a clingy mom, but I was wrong. It took some prying to get it out of her but she finally told me it was because she hadn't been feeling very well for a long time.
I tried talking her into seeing a doctor, but she wouldn't. My mom was the kind who wouldn't go see a doctor if her arm had fallen off. She'd just rub some dirt on it and carry on without complaint.
Then one day she did something completely out of the ordinary for her. She called me and asked me to take her to the emergency room. She explained she had this deep burning in her lower abdomen for a long time and it was becoming more than even my tough as nails mother could bear. I didn't know it at the time but she had also been contemplating suicide. She had been in tremendous pain for many years and hid it way too well. I had noticed she had lost weight, but she said she was dieting. My mother was always dieting, ever since her husband (my father) called her "fatty." Thanks dad for giving my mother an eating disorder.
After she had taken blood tests X-rayed her and CT scanned the attending E.R. physician came out to talk to me. His face was white. I knew it wasn't good news.
He explained to me my mother was riddled with cancer. It had probably started in her lower abdomen and had more than likely caused by the Endometriosis she had when she was a young mother.
I remember her telling me about the operation she had when she was in her early 30s. She said they literally had to scrape the endometriosis that was growing on her intestines and put them back in.
Tests showed the cancer had spread to her kidneys, liver and her brain. Her oncologist told me she must have had the cancer for more than 5 years. He also told me she probably had a year to live, maybe more only if she started radical chemotherapy and radiation as soon as possible.
They never got a chance to.
Twenty one days later I buried my beloved mother. I haven't recovered and probably never will. I think of her everyday and always will.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A year later I was still going through my own thing and again I found myself in the emergency room, coincidentally the same E.R. my mother had been diagnosed in. The same doctor suggested an X-Ray and a CT scan something no other doctor had thought to do. To say I was nervous was an understatement. Still, as depressed as I was I didn't really care one way or the other. I didn't want to die, I just wanted it all to be over.
After X-rays and blood tests the doctor came in and told my wife and myself the prognosis. I had a huge mass on the base of my throat. He told her it was most likely thyroid cancer.
The mass had dropped below my sternum and was sitting just above my heart causing me pain. It was also probably the underlying cause of my manic/depression and a host of other mental symptoms.
He told her about thyroid storms and that is why I was sometimes become super-hyper-man followed by the inevitable crash and depression of hypothyroidism. My body was on a roller coaster ride of hormones that I couldn't sense or control. All this time, all those pills and therapies - it had been misdiagnosed as a mental illness.
To make a long story short (and after another few hundred tests) needle-biopsies and 3D imaging of the tumor, the doctors had devised a plan to remove the bastard.
They figured the surgery would last an hour and a half - two tops. It would have to be removed in a way as to not spread the cancer or damage the parathyroid glands. They scheduled the surgery which involved taking biopsies of the removed tissue and examining it under a microscope to see if it had spread.
In reality it was a much more complicated than they had thought and I was on the table almost 5 hours. At one point I even woke during the surgery but they put me right back under. At another point my wife thought I must have died on the table. Despite everything , the surgery went well and the prognosis was good.
To make a long story short (and to my great surprise) I survived. The cancer had not spread and a benign tumor surrounding the cancer had stopped it from metastasizing. Now my thyroid hormones come in pill form every morning. Every six months my blood is checked to see if the cancer returned. It has not and they don't expect it plus it has been almost 30 years.
In less than a year I was my old geeky self again with my thyroid levels balanced, but I was still mourning the loss of my mother and probably always will.
I patched things up with my step-daughter and today she's one of my best and closest friends. She tells me the changes she saw in me were nothing short of miraculous.
Interesting side note, when the tumor was biopsied it showed I had a rare form of cancer that only shows up in people who lived close to nuclear test sites.
The doctor asked me if I lived in Nevada in my youth. We did, for a time we lived in Elko, Nevada and Bountiful Utah, both states being immediately down-wind of the Nevada Test Site.
Thyroid cancers like mine are practically as common as crows there, so common they even have a term for it - Downwinders syndrome. The doctor suggested my siblings should have their thyroids checked as well. They found the exact same cancer in my sister. She survived her surgery as well but I lost her early this year to renal failure. I miss her beyond measure too.
 |
| My sister at 16 playing Bonnie Parker |
One good thing about recovering from major surgery is it gave me tons of time to get my radio geek back on and log thousands of active civil and military aviation frequencies. I also began building my dream radio room and added dozens of new high-tech scanning receivers.
I had made a name for myself writing for three radio communications hobbyist magazines and as a result I was commissioned by Universal Radio to write a book The Comprehensive Guide To Military Monitoring, which not only came with a healthy advance, scanning radio manufacturers were sending me free cutting-edge gear for me to review. I was in scanner-geek heaven.
The book was an underground hit and helped pay the bills for many years and it gave me the freedom to get back to my Interceptor Project but now in ways that I could never have imagined. Technology had finally caught up with my vision giving me the ability to monitor the airwaves on a scale that wasn't possible before.
The new monitoring system paid off in other ways as well. I started my own business called, The Reporter's Edge - a professional news tip service.
Every TV station and even the newspaper I used to work for paid me decent money to do what I was already doing for free, keeping my ears to the scanners. I made sure they new about every breaking news event happening in our area. Since I was also good at breaking national news, I even had several networks paying me a monthly fee to apprise them of anything I might monitor that would be of national interest. News directors kept my phone number on speed dial, and their conversations would start with "What are you hearing?" or "What do you know?"
But as much as I loved my new self made intelligence agency, there were times where I felt I had strayed off course and needed to get back to what I had envisioned so many years ago.
Time for less shoe-gazing and much more sky gazing.
I became so connected that sometimes I had to disconnect.
I always loved the desert. For someone who always looked skyward, the desert air had a clarity that soothed me. Whenever I needed a
sane break from reality, I would head to neighboring New Mexico. I loved Texas but there's a quality of light and space that begs to be photographed, and after all I had been trained to be a creative photographer. If being an Interceptor was my destiny, photography was my passion. Once my financial and physical self got better, my mental self followed and it led me to Roswell.
As it would happen my in-laws owned a home in Roswell, New Mexico. My father-in-law, Elwood Johnston told me about an annual military exercise called Roving Sands and thought maybe I might be interested in it.
He sent me a clipping from the Roswell Record describing the exercise. It was slated as the largest military exercise in the world.
The sleepy Roswell Industrial Air Center (formerly Roswell Army Air Force Base) would basically be turned into a landlocked aircraft carrier. The Red Forces (playing the adversaries) consisting of F-14 Tomcats, F-18 Hornets, A-10 Warthogs and B-52 and B-1B bombers as well as E-2C Hawkeyes, E-3 AWACS and a mixture of Navy helicopter forces (including a contingency of Navy SEALS) would do faux-battle with the Green Forces (based at Holloman Air Force Base and at Ft Bliss in El Paso, Texas) over the White Sands Missile Range for 21 days in April.
I made the four and a half hour trip to Roswell and had just pulled into the driveway of my in-laws' home when we were buzzed by a dozen F-14s.
Their house was just about a mile from the airport and basically on the final approach. It was a promising start to what would be an eventful couple of weeks.
I unpacked my kit in a hurry, ate, chatted with Elwood and my mother-in-law Patsy but I was anxious to go out to the air-center and check out the scene. Elwood lent me his old propane-powered Ford pickup and told me the New Mexico State Police just loved pulling over Texans plus with all my radios and gear they'd probably think I was a spy of some sort and lock me up and take their sweet time making sure I wasn't. The farm truck with New Mexico plats would be less conspicuous.
I wired in my scanners, used the truck's old AM broadcast antenna because mounting magnet mount antennas all over it would also probably draw unwanted attention. I even went so far as to stash my camera bag on the floor on the passenger side. It would turn out that all these attempts to stay under the radar were for naught because nobody cared. By the end of the week the truck was sporting so many antennas Elwood renamed it the Propane Porcupine.
As I pulled into the Roswell Industrial Air Center (RIAC) I smiled to see all the military antennas, mobile command centers and satellite dishes spread out al around the air center. I was in Interceptor heaven. As I pulled up the fence-line three B-1B bombers were taxiing by and F-14s were warming up for the afternoon sortie.
I was happy to see other citizens at the fence line with cameras, taking photos and videos of the military aircraft taxiing just a hundred feet away.
Air Force and Army personnel were everywhere and paid us no mind. I had to remind myself Roswell wasn't a military base anymore but a civilian airport. Whenever I had visited military bases before (as a member of the press) I always had to ask permission in advance and I was escorted everywhere. Here I was free to do a I please just as long as I didn't get in the way.
The B-52s were the most impressive, followed by the B-1bs that took off with afterburners that rattled the area for what seemed like forever, their engines roaring.
When I wasn't photographing, I'd go to the truck and search the military air bands for active frequencies and believe me there were plenty. It was so cool to hear the fighters and bombers going into the White Sands Missile Range just over the mountains to the immediate west.
It was especially fun listening to the fighter packages forming up and the plane to plane chatter. It sounded like Top Gun on steroids. The simulated air combat sorties would start with the phrase, "Fights on recorders on" and would end with "Knock it off." repeated three times. The F-14s and F-18s would then hit a KC-135 tanker right over Roswell. It was an amazing sight, a KC-135 with a half a dozen fighters in trail all waiting for gas so they could get back into the fight.
On most days there were three sorties, a small-scale one in the morning that mostly involved recon aircraft like RF-4s and E-2C Hawkeyes and occasionally I would hear the callsign ASPEN, a good indication a U-2 from Beal AFB was flying overhead at 80,000 feet taking photos - but I could never see them.
After lunch some of the fighters would launch again and engage in some air-combat- maneuvers (ACM) with F-15s and F-16s based at Holloman, AFB in Alamogordo just 90 minutes away by truck.
After an afternoon lunch and launch I'd driver up and over the mountains to the
Sunspot Observatory (a great mountain top to look down on WSMR and Holloman AFB) and scan the military frequencies and watch the day's exercises. Above me, I could see the contrails of fighters mixing it up and below I'd watch them landing at Holloman. It was a lot of fun. Meanwhile I was also logging and recording what my scanners were picking up. I couldn't wait to write my next article for Monitoring Times.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many times I would go down the western side of the mountains and into the
White Sands National Park located just a mile west of Holloman AFB to monitor and photograph. White Sands is an amazing stark but beautiful place. At sunset the white gypsum dunes would reflect the color of the sky.
It is almost and I've been there many times since. The Sunset Walk is something everyone should put on their bucket list.
Since then, I have taken advantage of the primitive camping there and it's something I can't recommend enough. Permits are limited and you have to register far in advance. It's tents only, no campers but the white sands are like sleeping on a firm mattress.
On full moon nights, I would wander out on the dunes and take it all in. It's almost prehistoric in feeling, and the stars seem right there in your face. It's vey quiet most nights except when night operations take place on the White Sands Missile Range.
Bring a night vision lens for the full experience. From on top of a dune you can see fighter/bombers working the Red Rio Range to the North, The McGregor Range to the south and the occasional Patriot missile test by the Army.
Not to mention, if Area 51 is where skunky-stealthy aircraft were are born, then the White Sands Missile Range is where they came of age.
Holloman Air Force base is home to many test units. Arguably the first stealth aircraft, the F-117 Nighthawk was based there and the base currently hosts F-16s and drones of various types, some classified.
On any cool evening in the fall (I don't recommend this in the heat of summer) hike down the northern dune trail and top one of the larger waves of pure white sand (what remains of an ancient inland sea bed) and you might catch sight of two secret technology testing bases.
The first is
Northup Strip also known as Space Harbor, known publicly as a secondary landing strip for the Space Shuttle. Space Harbor boasts the brightest landing lighting system in the world and it's been said it can easily be seen from orbit. Officially it's maintained by NASA but in its long history the Space Shuttle only landed there twice since it was constructed in 1976.
A few miles to the northwest (nestled against the base of the western mountain rage ringing the Tularosa Basin) is the
RAMS/RATSCAT National Radar Cross Section facility where full scale models of secret stealth prototype aircraft are placed on tall pillars that come out of the ground at night and are radiated with all kinds of radars to see how truly small their radar signature are.
Before it flew at Area 51 in Nevada, the prototype of F-117 (
HAVE BLUE) was hoisted aloft at RAMS/RATSCAT.
If you have a good pair of binoculars you can just make it out especially at night when they are readying the radars but when they put the secret aircraft on a pole and raise them up to be tested it's lights out to keep prying eyes or passing imaging satellite from seeing what they are testing. More on what goes on in the White Sands Missile Range in another post.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I returned back to Roswell and went out on the base road on the southwest side to watch the aircraft launch for the evening sortie. It was a great place to scan the airwaves and watch the skies. Over the week the pilots got used to seeing me at the fence line and sometimes they give me a wing-wag as their way of saying hello, I see you.
Sometimes after or before the days' sorties pilots would meet me at the fence and ask me if I took any photos of their aircraft. If one thing was for sure, it's pilots have egos and they wanted photos of their aircraft in flight. They'd give their information and the tail code and I'd find a snap of their ride in my stacks and send them a print. In return they'd send me a unit patch.
Every year Roving Sands would have a pubic outreach event and citizens were allowed inside the fence to meet the servicemen and look at their machines close-up. Many of the pilots recognize me as being
the guy at the fence and they would talk to me. I made sure I had a stack of my best still photos fresh from the drugstore to hand out. It was a great way to make contacts. I told them who I was, who I wrote for and what all the radios were for. Most were surprised their communications were that easy to monitor. Some wanted to know what equipment to buy so they could do it at home one they had left the military. I made friendships that lasted to this day.
Most went on to fly civil airliners or work (and fly) for civilian military contractors. Occasionally they'd stop in my hometown and we'd have lunch. Many of them followed my writings and especially the articles I did on black projects, which started with a sighting that I was about to have.
It was just after dark when my farther-in-law showed up at the fence line to watch the free airshow. His wife Patsy (my mother-in-law) usually kept a short leash on him but on this evening he had ditched the monthly meeting at the Roswell Soroptimist Club and decided to come take a look-see.
He had a good time. I showed him how the scanners worked and soon we were listening to the chatter of the refueling tankers orbiting overhead. He thought that was pretty cool. We watched as the E-3 AWACs departed, then the B-1Bs, and finally the F-14s. We could hear them fighting their pretend war.
I brought out some aviation charts and tried my best to paint this 3-D picture of what was going one in the airspace of southern New Mexico.
Elwood was having a good time and we were bonding as father-in-law and son-in-law, which was good thing because he had probably only heard the bad about me during my bout with my thyroid cancer.
He seemed to like hanging out and we hung out way beyond his usual curfew.
So there we were, just chatting away, waiting for the Roswell Red Forces to return and we saw it.
At first it was this barely visible blob flying low on the horizon. Elwood spotted it first and pointed it out to me. I was surprised he even saw it. Whatever it was wasn't lit like the fighters and bombers usually are. There were no anti-collision strobes or the typical red and green wingtip lights, just one softly glowing strobing red light on the bottom centerline.
I picked up my video camera, zoomed all the way in and watched it through the viewfinder. It was getting bigger which indicated to me it was flying directly for us.
illustration by Steve Douglass
I pressed record noticing only then then the flashing battery light and then the viewfinder went dead. The battery was exhausted. I got six seconds of video then nothing. I fished in my pocket and grabbed another battery and popped it in as fast I could. The viewfinder flashed then nothing. I tried another battery, nothing.
Consigned to failure I did the only thing I could do, watch as this ghostly apparition of an aircraft flew incredibly silent almost over us and then slowly did a U-turn and disappearing into the night.
I looked over at Elwood who was watching it through binoculars. He dropped them and said to me in his western drawl, "What the fuck was that?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMING UP NEXT - EVERYTHING IS A UFO
If you have a good pair of binoculars you can just make it out especially at night when they are readying the radars but when they put the secret aircraft on a pole and raise them up to be tested it's lights out to keep prying eyes or passing imaging satellite from seeing what they are testing. More on what goes on in the White Sands Missile Range in another post. 
Comments
Post a Comment