Too bad it didn’t involve UFOs
As a kid, I was nothing short of obsessed. I collected stacks of UFO books — both fictitious and, allegedly, true — knew all about Barney and Betty Hill, watched “Fire in The Sky” and the “The X-Files” religiously.
I’m now 30 years old. A crime reporter, I depend on certainties — motives, evidence and background.
So when my editor plopped a story on my desk about the mysterious evacuation of an observatory at Sunspot, in southern New Mexico, I treated it like any other.
In a nutshell: Someone showed up two weeks ago at the National Solar Observatory at Sacramento Peak, near
Cloudcroft, and told employees to pack up. They were being evacuated, along with residents who live nearby and a clerk at a post office on the site.
Nobody was told why this was happening, outside of the vagueness of “security concern,” or when they could return.
By the time I started working on the story, it had been out there a week.
There were still no answers as the story — or lack thereof — crept across the pages of small papers and murmurs of a conspiracy dotted internet message boards.
But like a weed, the murmurs grew into something bigger, wilder, as esteemed national newspapers including The Washington Post wrote grounded pieces on the closure and tabloids tickled the whimsy of fanatics with phrases like “geomagnetic storms,” “Chinese hacking” and “alien saucers.”
The Sunspot observatory website said the facility, whose motto is “Staring at the Sun Since 1947,” was closed due to “unforeseen circumstances.”
I called the FBI, which referred me to the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, or AURA, an agency that oversees the observatory.
In a prepared statement, AURA said it decided to “temporarily vacate” due to a “security issue” and was working with “proper authorities,” whom it declined to name. From there it got a little weird. A spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service told me he was waiting for a call — from whom he didn’t know — to tell him when the post office could reopen.
Otero County Sheriff Benny House told me the FBI was involved before his phone cut out. I tried to reach him 10 more times.
An employee at the nearby Apache Point Observatory, who would speak only anonymously, said Black Hawk helicopters had been hovering in the area, along with nameless authorities reluctant to talk to anyone.
So I wrote the story best I could and filed it for a Page One spot in the paper.
I thought it was over, but the next day my story was picked up by DrudgeReport.com, online views rose to over 40,000 and the emails began pouring in.
Some were simple and supportive, thanking me for grasping at the straws of truth. Others asked, “What did I really believe?” and said that if I knew anything I didn’t report — they could keep the secret.
I was sent pictures of a saucer looking object seen during a recent eclipse by a woman in California. I received links to hourlong discussions on conspiracies and eerie YouTube videos of drones flying over — and people strolling into — the abandoned observatory.
A radio station in Canada wanted to interview me on air about the “mystery” in Sunspot.
In an effort to quiet the masses, I pressed the FBI spokesman to confirm that UFOs and/or aliens did not prompt the closure. I got an email back that said, simply, “no extraterrestrials.”
Then the observatory announced it was reopening.
And, at the insistence of my editor, I was preparing to travel the four hours to Sunspot when I got a news alert from KRQE-TV: “Sunspot observatory closure linked to a child porn investigation.”
In disbelief, I found the 30-page FBI search warrant, and sure enough, it says the whole ordeal started with a janitor downloading child porn on the observatory’s Wi-Fi. The FBI had traced the signal to a janitor’s laptop and seized it from the observatory without notice.
When the janitor returned to find his laptop missing, his behavior escalated from whining about “lax security” at the site to spreading the word that a serial killer was loose in the area and would one day “execute” an employee, according to the warrant.
It wasn’t the child porn, but these subsequent threats, that made AURA decide to evacuate and shutter the observatory and nearby post office.
Ironically, the story turned out to be on my crime beat after all.
Did the revelations stop the theories floating across the internet or put an end to the emails filling my inbox? No. According to some of our readers, my article — backed by a federal search warrant — was “B.S.,” “a cover-up” and a case of the media “spinning its wheels.”
I partly blame this resistance to the facts presented by authorities on the silence of those same authorities that followed, and continues to follow, the closure. By saying nothing, they left the public to fill in the blanks with any amount of nonsense and speculation they saw fit.
With no proof, who is to say anyone’s guess is wrong? Often the truth is disappointing. From the bottom of my heart, I want to apologize to my newfound fans and my younger self, with his hopeful eyes peering into the vastness of space.
I let you down with just another story that’s all too familiar — of people being rotten.
It wasn’t aliens, but I sure wish it had been.