On Listening, Listeners and Liars.

On Listening, Listeners and Liars. 

By Steve Douglass

The K-219 accident happened in October 1986, and the submarine sank on October 6, 1986, in the North Atlantic northeast of Bermuda. Few knew about it until I opened my big mouth. By the time the world heard about K-219, I knew more than most people in the Pentagon. 

One October night, when shortwave propagation was near perfect (no fading) I was dialing through  the bands when I came  upon some U.S. Navy HF traffic on 8.989 MHz, upper sideband.  

That night it was mostly routine communications checks until I intercepted a phone patch to the U.S. Navy Department—the kind of transmission you pay attention to because of its tone as much as its content. 

A U.S. ship was on scene, and the voice on the circuit was tight, controlled, but unmistakably alarmed. They were reporting Soviet sailors up on the deck of the submarine, and more to the point, that radiation detectors were sounding off. I had a hard time believing what I was hearing, an in-the-clear communication about a Soviet sub on the surface and on fire! These kind of communications was what drew me to the hobby. I had intercepted nautical S.O.S. calls before buy this was next level.

It hit me like a ton of bricks, a crippled Soviet ballistic-missile sub, nuclear-armed, leaking radiation, floating on the ocean not that far from Bermuda and I was listening to it all pour out of my radio like it was next door. 

I recorded everything.

Not long after, I called the CBS News desk in New York. I spoke first to somebody who was just manning the news desk. He wasn't convinced I wasn't a crank. I played more recordings for him and also let him listen in real time over the phone. 

It took about 30 minutes of him hearing what  I was hearing to convince him I wasn't pulling his leg and so  he passed me off to Dan Rather. I had to repeat everything I told the news desk guy and then some. I let him listen real time as well. They had all kinds of technical questions and then said they'd call me back.

I told him I would continue monitoring and recording. Rather didn't seem convinced and I truly didn't expect to hear back from him. Who could blame him for doubting me? Here I was in nowhere Texas listening to a U.S. Navy phone patch from a ship located thousands of miles from the prairies of Texas. 

I got a call back from someone who I took to be an engineer at CBS. He asked me all kinds of technical questions which I answered. Then I let him listen to my recording.

That changed things.

CBS arranged for me to drop of my recording at the local airport. A CBS corporate jet that was already bound for New York from Los Angeles would land at the FBO and I'd pass the tapes to the pilot. I did. 

CBS took the tape to the Navy Department at the Pentagon. At first, the response was flat denial. No incident. No confirmation. Nothing to see here. So I sent more—a whole batch of recordings, delivered by another special courier. Those tapes filled in the picture: location, submarine type, operational details, the kind of information you don’t guess or fake.

Once CBS played those recordings, the story shifted. The Navy came back and confirmed the intercept. They wanted to know where the tapes came from, who the source was.

CBS didn’t tell them.

That moment mattered. Not just because the story broke, but because it established trust. From that point on, CBS knew I was real, that what I was bringing them was solid. It put me on the map with them, and it all started with a crackling HF signal and the quiet realization that a nuclear accident was unfolding in real time, far from public view.

Looking back, what stays with me isn’t just the history—it’s how close it all felt. How much of the Cold War lived in those unseen moments, passed over radio waves, caught only if someone happened to be listening.

The B-1B crash and a father's love.

The second time I realized I was listening to history unfold, it was over West Texas.

I was monitoring UHF traffic when a B‑1B bomber transmission caught my attention. At first it sounded routine, the kind of exchange you half‑listen to while waiting for something more interesting. Then the crew began talking about autopilot problems. Not casually. Repeatedly. The aircraft wasn’t holding what it was supposed to hold, and you could hear the extra work creeping into their voices as they compensated.

They were flying near the Guadalupe Mountains.

Nothing about the transmission suggested recklessness or confusion. These were professionals methodically working a problem. No mayday. No drama. Just a system that wouldn’t behave—and a crew doing their best to manage it.

Then the transmissions stopped.

When the crash became public, the explanation followed quickly: human error. According to the report the pilot had neglected to "shift fuel." Nothing was said about attention consuming auto-pilot problems. Clean. Final. Convenient. At the time, the B‑1B program was actively seeking continued funding from Congress, and technical failures were not something anyone wanted in the spotlight. “Pilot error” closed the book neatly.

But my recordings didn’t fit that story.

When details of the intercept became public, they were printed in Aviation Week & Space Technology. That’s when the U.S. Air Force public‑relations machine pushed back hard. They said there was no way a “ham radio operator” could possibly monitor communications at that level. The implication was clear: if the recordings existed at all, they couldn’t be legitimate.

That argument said more about a technical ignorance USAF's spin-department of it's own communications systems than it did The B-1B crash or anyone's ability to monitor them. 

Then something unexpected happened.

Aviation Week called me and said a man had reached out to them—the father of the pilot. He didn’t believe the Air Force’s explanation either. Worse, he’d been told, or led to believe, that his son might have been suicidal. That was the quiet subtext behind “human error,” and it cut far deeper than any technical conclusion.

They asked me if I wanted to speak with him. I did.

I told him what I had heard. I explained the autopilot complaints, the tone of the crew, the professionalism in their voices. I told him there was nothing—nothing at all—in those transmissions that suggested recklessness, despair, or intent. Just a crew wrestling with a malfunctioning aircraft.

I couldn’t change the official finding. I couldn’t rewrite the accident report or force the Air Force to admit anything it didn’t want to. But I could tell one father the truth as I knew it.

That his son was doing his job. That he wasn’t careless. That he wasn’t suicidal.That he wasn’t the cause of the crash.

In the end, that mattered more than the narrative.

The Air Force kept its conclusion. The program moved on. But for one family, the story was no longer just a line in a report. And for me, it was a reminder that listening isn’t just about history or secrets or proving someone wrong.

Sometimes it’s about giving someone back their son’s honor. 

Phil Patton read the account and was intrigued. He had also seen Stuart Brown’s Popular Science article on the Roswell “TR‑3A” sighting, and he realized that people like me—civilian interceptors, hobbyists, listeners—made for a compelling story, not just a technical one. 

He convinced WIRED magazine to run the piece, framing us as a new breed of radio hackers, intent not on breaking systems but on pulling back the curtain to reveal reality as it unfolded. In Phil’s telling, we weren’t chasing mystery for curiosity or fame. We were witnesses to history, capturing moments that would otherwise be rewritten or hidden.

K‑219. The B‑1B. The quiet signals over the airwaves that no one else noticed. Each one reminded me that the truth often travels first in voices and frequencies, unguarded and fleeting. And sometimes, it’s not governments, investigators, or press releases that preserve that truth—but someone willing to listen, record, and pass it on.

That’s what I did. That’s what I still do. And every time I press record, I know I might be hearing history before it announces itself.

Phil Patton’s article, “Stealth Watchers,” ran in WIRED back in the mid‑1990s and it was fascinating. He basically introduced the world to a bunch of people who were doing what I was doing—listening, watching, recording, all with relatively simple tools, but paying attention to things the government wanted to keep secret. These weren’t spies or hackers in the Hollywood sense—they were hobbyists, “ham” operators, and aviation enthusiasts using scanners, radios, and cameras to track classified aircraft, aircraft that we (as taxpayers) had paid for. 

What grabbed Patton, though, wasn’t just the technical side. He saw a human story—people curious enough to challenge secrecy, piecing together fragments of reality before it was officially acknowledged. 

And that’s what led him to write Dreamland. In the book, he expanded the focus beyond stealth planes to Area 51, Roswell, and the communities that grew up around these secret programs—people like us, hobbyists and interceptors, as well as UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy buffs. He showed how secrecy, folklore, technology, and human curiosity all mix together in this strange little corner of the world.

In a way, Stealth Watchers was like a test run for Dreamland: it proved that people cared about the stories of those of us listening, watching, and documenting, not just the hardware or official accounts. And for me, it was validating—my work, my recordings, my “listening in”—suddenly had a place in the larger narrative. We weren’t just tinkering with radios. We were part of the story.

Phil wasn’t just a writer or a reporter; he was a friend who made me see things differently. In those long hours on the phone, and during the drives through Roswell and New Mexico, he pushed me to notice the small details—the way a signal crackled, the way a story unfolded, the human moments behind the events. 

He had this rare ability to look at the world sideways, to catch the nuance others missed, and it rubbed off on me. I learned from him that listening wasn’t just about capturing facts—it was about understanding context, emotion, and meaning. 

When he passed away, I realized how much those conversations, debates, and shared discoveries had shaped the way I approached my own work. He left behind stories, yes—but more importantly, he left a way of seeing, one that stays with me every time I press record.

Knowing Phil changed how I thought about Mark.

Before Phil, I tended to approach mysteries the same way I approached signals: isolate them, verify them, line them up against what could be proven. Phil didn’t dismiss that instinct—but he kept reminding me that some truths don’t announce themselves cleanly. As we drove through Roswell and the back roads of New Mexico, or talked late into the night, he’d ask questions that didn’t demand answers so much as attention. Not Was Mark telling the truth? but Why does this story exist? Not What really happened at Roswell? but Who needed it to happen that way?

Through Phil’s lens, Mark stopped being just a puzzle to solve or a source to vet. He became a node in a larger human system—memory, secrecy, fear, belief. Phil helped me see that the mystery wasn’t only about a crash or recovered materials, but about how people carry secrets, how stories survive, and how truth can fracture into layers without fully disappearing. Mark’s silences, his precision about some things and vagueness about others, started to make a different kind of sense.

Phil never pushed me toward belief or disbelief. What he gave me was something more useful: permission to sit with ambiguity without surrendering rigor. To understand that not every mystery is meant to be solved—some are meant to be understood. That shift changed how I listened to Mark, and how I listened in general. And once you learn to listen that way, Roswell stops being a single event and becomes something much larger: a long echo, still moving through people, decades later.

Grenada and Operation Urgent Fury

By the fall of 1983, it was obvious something was coming. I’d been monitoring radio traffic in the Caribbean for days, maybe weeks, and the tone had changed. More activity, more coordination, more urgency. You don’t need a briefing to know when the machinery is starting to move.

Grenada was a small island, but the situation there had gotten ugly fast. The Marxist government had collapsed in a violent internal coup. Prime Minister Maurice Bishop had been arrested and then executed, along with several of his supporters, and a hardline military council took over. 

Communications went quiet, the airport was shut down, and suddenly there were about six hundred American medical students sitting in the middle of it. The Reagan administration said they were in danger. They also pointed to the growing Cuban presence on the island, officially construction workers, unofficially something else entirely.

On October 25, the invasion began. Operation Urgent Fury sounded, over the air, like something being built as it was being flown. Different services trying to talk to each other, radios that didn’t quite line up, maps that didn’t match the terrain. You could hear confusion and frustration mixed with determination. It worked, but it wasn’t pretty. Grenada would later become one of the reasons Congress forced the military to get serious about joint operations.

What really stayed with me, though, wasn’t the combat traffic.

At one point, I intercepted a phone patch involving a congressional aide speaking directly to Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the House. Democrats were deeply opposed to the invasion, especially coming so soon after the Beirut bombing. The tone of the call was tense. Then the aide said something that cut straight through the politics. He mentioned mass graves.

There was a pause. You could almost feel the air leave the line.

Then the aide was reminded—very clearly—that he was on an open circuit. He was told not to talk about that. Not now. Not ever. The subject ended right there.

After that, the public story took shape quickly. The students were rescued. Weapons caches were found. Cuban involvement was highlighted. Order was restored. The operation was declared a success and wrapped up in days.

As for the mass graves, the record was never straightforward. U.S. forces did find graves connected to executions carried out during the coup, including people killed when Bishop was overthrown. But any suggestion of large-scale atrocities never really made it into the official narrative. Whether what that aide was reacting to was early reporting, incomplete intelligence, or something someone decided was better left unsaid, I can’t say for certain.

What I do know is that I heard it before the story hardened.

Grenada came and went quickly, but it left a mark. It exposed cracks in military coordination and showed, once again, how fast politics moves to manage what the public is allowed to hear. And for me, it reinforced something I’d already learned: the most revealing moments often slip out early, in unguarded sentences, before someone remembers to close the line.

That’s when listening matters most.

Bad Cops 

It was a cold, foggy winter morning, the kind where sound carries strangely and everything feels slowed down.

The call itself didn’t stand out at first. A stalled vehicle on one of the major highways. Two people out of the car, pushing it. That kind of thing happens all the time. A patrol car was dispatched. Nothing unusual. Nothing that suggested what was coming next.

What I heard afterward is what stuck with me.

I was monitoring the unofficial car-to-car frequency, the one where officers talk more freely. The patrol unit assigned to the call passed right by the two people without stopping. I heard him mention he was already on overtime and anxious to get off the clock. He didn’t say it like a confession—more like an aside. They were pushing the car uphill toward an off-ramp, and he figured they “pretty much had this.”

Minutes later, a truck slammed into them.

Another call came in—this one urgent. Fire and medical were dispatched. The impact had crushed the legs of a woman who had been helping push the car. It was the kind of incident where you immediately think, this didn’t have to happen.

Later, I recorded two officers talking about it. One of them was the same officer who had driven past. He said it plainly. He’d seen them. He thought they were okay. He didn’t stop. If he had—if he’d helped push the car, or blocked traffic, or even slowed things down—that crash might never have happened.

At the time, I was freelancing, contracted to monitor scanners for the TV station I’d eventually work for full-time. I called the newsroom and played the recording. They listened carefully. Then they did what journalists are supposed to do. They ran the story.

They aired excerpts of the audio. They asked the obvious question: could this tragedy have been prevented if the officer had done his job?

The public reaction was immediate and brutal. Social media lit up, and none of it was favorable to APD. The station never identified who had recorded the traffic, but I’d been around long enough—and loud enough—that it wasn’t hard for them to guess.

Not long after that, things changed.

Police cars started driving through my apartment complex. They’d shine bright spotlights into my bedroom window late at night, or hit the siren just long enough to wake me up. I got pulled over for no reason. I started noticing marked and unmarked units following me. It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t paranoia. It was pressure.

Then one day the news director called me. The police chief had contacted him and wanted to know who I was. He didn’t tell them. They asked if he would put them in touch with me. They said they wanted to “explain what really happened” and correct what I had recorded.

I declined.

About a year later, the station hired me full-time as a videographer and news gatherer. One of my first assignments was to interview APD’s press spokesman about an upcoming event. The interview itself went fine. Professional. Cordial.

Then the door closed.

One of the PIOs looked at me and asked, point-blank, if I was the one who made the recording.

I didn’t dodge it. I said yes.

For the next twenty minutes, they unloaded. They told me how much that story had damaged their public image. They showed me social media posts calling them lazy, uncaring, indifferent. They blamed me for it.

I told them something they didn’t want to hear. I hadn’t damaged their image. Their actions had. All I did was let people hear what actually happened.

I stepped out, called my news director, and told him exactly what was going on. He came down immediately, demanded to see the two PIOs, and made it clear that if the harassment didn’t stop—right now—then everything, including that meeting, would become the lead story.

They backed off.

But for the next two years, it was obvious we were being frozen out. At SWAT standoffs and breaking news scenes, my station was the last to get information. I’d be positioned where I couldn’t get clean video. Access was limited. The message was subtle but clear.

Eventually, both of those PIOs retired. They were replaced by two veteran patrol officers who already knew the story and didn’t approve of how it had been handled. Things changed. Slowly, but noticeably.

These days, I’m treated much better. They know I’m fair. They know I’m respectful. They also know I’ll ask the hard questions no one else wants to ask—and that when credit is due, I’ll give it.

That morning in 2014 still stays with me. Not because of the backlash or the pressure, but because it didn’t have to end the way it did. And because once again, listening—really listening—meant bearing witness to a truth someone else would rather have stayed unheard.

That’s been the pattern of my life.
I listen. I record and sometimes, that makes people uncomfortable.

At its core, uncovering wrongdoing has never been about chasing scandals for me. It’s been about paying attention when something feels off, and being willing to follow that thread even when it gets uncomfortable.

Most of what I’ve uncovered didn’t come from secret sources or dramatic revelations. It came from listening carefully—to radio traffic, to tone, to what was said casually and what was avoided entirely. Wrongdoing often doesn’t announce itself as corruption or malice. It shows up as shortcuts, indifference, quiet decisions made when someone thinks no one is listening.

What I learned early on is that once you surface those moments, the pushback rarely focuses on whether the facts are true. Instead, it shifts to who you are, how you got the information, and why you shouldn’t have it. Institutions protect themselves first. Accountability comes later, if at all.

I didn’t always change official outcomes. Reports stayed written. Conclusions stayed intact. But uncovering wrongdoing wasn’t just about outcomes—it was about interrupting the story. Letting the public hear what actually happened before it was cleaned up. And sometimes, it was about something smaller but just as important: giving clarity to a family, restoring dignity to someone blamed unfairly, o r forcing a moment of reflection that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.

Over time, I came to understand that exposing wrongdoing isn’t about being adversarial. It’s about being honest, consistent, and patient. If you do that long enough, even the people who don’t like what you uncover begin to trust how you do it.

Listening led me there. Truth followed.

STINGRAYS 

One day, not long after I’d had several off-the-books conversations with Mark about Roswell, I stumbled onto something I wasn’t looking for at all.

It started mundanely. After a long conversation with Mark, I decided to grab some fast food. Halfway there, I realized I’d forgotten my wallet. I made a U-turn and came back down a side street not far from my place.

I was about two blocks from home when I saw it.

An unusual truck, parked quietly. No markings. No company name. But it was covered in antennas—too many, and arranged in a way that immediately set off alarms in my head. I knew what it was the moment I saw it. 

A Stingray. A mobile cell-site simulator. A man-in-the-middle machine used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies to mimic a cell tower and pull in every phone in range. Publicly acknowledged now, discussed in courtrooms and hearings, but still rarely seen so plainly.

I pulled over.

I got out of my car and walked up to the truck. I knocked. Hard. Then I banged on the side of it.

Nothing.

I knocked again and raised my voice. I told them, plainly, that I knew exactly what they were doing. That I knew what the truck was. That pretending no one was inside wasn’t fooling anyone who understood radios and signals.

Still nothing. The windows stayed dark. The doors stayed shut. That told me everything I needed to know.

I went back to my car and parked where I could see them clearly. And I stayed there. For hours. I watched the truck. Watched the area. Watched for movement. I didn’t approach again. I didn’t escalate. I just made it clear—without saying another word—that I wasn’t going anywhere.

Eventually, I noticed the shift. Subtle at first. Doors opening. Movement inside. The realization, on their end, that they weren’t invisible anymore—and that I wasn’t intimidated.

Before they left, I photographed the truck. The antennas. The setup. The details you don’t accidentally install. Then I photographed the men as they finally got out.

Only after that did they leave.

They didn’t confront me. They didn’t explain. They didn’t threaten. They simply drove off, the way people do when they know the moment has passed and the cover is blown.

Maybe it had nothing to do with me. That’s always the official answer.

But timing matters. Context matters. And coincidence has a way of wearing thin when you’ve spent your life paying attention.

I went home that day with the same feeling I’ve had more than once over the years—the quiet understanding that listening doesn’t just reveal other people’s stories. Sometimes it makes you part of one, whether you asked to be or not.

And once you realize that, you listen even more carefully—not just to signals, but to silence.

After that day, I changed how I operate.

I don’t talk freely on wireless devices anymore—not about Mark, not about Roswell, not about anything that matters. To some people, that might sound like paranoia. It isn’t. It’s pattern recognition. When you’ve spent your life listening, you learn the difference.

The computer that holds my notes on conversations with Mark has been air-gapped from the start. No Wi-Fi. No Bluetooth. No network connection of any kind. Everything important exists offline. I also made printed backups—hard copies of documents, notes, and conversations—and stored them in a secure location I didn’t personally control. A place with eyes on it at all times. Somewhere I couldn’t casually access, and no one else could quietly remove things from.

That wasn’t about fear. It was about discipline. Mark taught me that.

Information only stays safe if it isn’t convenient. And once you understand how easily signals can be intercepted, copied, or quietly redirected, convenience becomes the enemy.

I didn’t stop listening. I didn’t stop asking questions. I just became more deliberate about where silence mattered.

There’s more to that part of the story. How those safeguards were set up. Why the distance was intentional. And what came later.

But that comes after.

-Steve Douglass