“They Just Evacuated Us”: Conspiracy Theories Run Wild After FBI Shuts Down Solar Observatory
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Sat, 09/15/2018
The National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico was raided and shut down by the FBI on September 6 over an undisclosed national security issue, stirring up a wide array of conspiracy theories on YouTube, social media and tabloids.
“There was a Blackhawk helicopter, a bunch of people around antennas and work crews on towers, but nobody would tell us anything,” Otero County Sheriff Benny House told the Alamogordo Daily News. “I don’t know why the FBI would get involved so quick and not tell us anything.”
An anonymous 4chan user who called both nearby Apache Point Observatory and the local sheriff was told that they were “locked out” of the Sunspot observatory and had no idea what was going on.
Located near both White Sands Missile Range and infamous Roswell New Mexico, speculation over the observatory’s abrupt closure has ranged from an alien mothership using the sun to “refuel”, to a devastating solar disaster such as the 1859 Carrington Event – a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) which would have undoubtedly blown out most satellites and electronics had they been invented yet.
Despite unusually high sunspot activity during an otherwise quiet period and a minor CME ejection which hit Earth last week, it appears that threat has passed, for now – as a CME takes anywhere from one to three days to hit, which brings us back to aliens and other theories. It doesn’t help that several public solar observatory cams have gone offline, including NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) which will be offline “for several weeks” in order to update the “code infrastructure that provides access to SOHO data.”
Others have pointed to the fact that NASA launched a new solar probe last month – the first-ever mission to “touch” the sun, while the space agency will (or has) shot it’s Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager (FOXSI) 190 miles into space for a 15-minute “peek” at the sun.
The FOXSI mission will take its third flight from the White Sands Missile Range in White Sands, New Mexico, no earlier than September 7, the agency said in a statement. Derived from the nautical term “to sound”, meaning to measure, FOXSI rockets make brief 15-minute journeys above the Earth’s atmosphere for a peek at space before falling back to the ground. -TimesNowNews
One reader who wishes to remain anonymous has a few theories, including why other solar observatories around the world haven’t been raided and locked down:
The many thousands of telescopes world wide are normally looking at the night sky, not at the sun. Additionally, most telescopes are looking at things at distances of 100,000’s of light years. They won’t “see” a UFO hovering right if front of them, or even a few light minutes away. Only solar scopes are looking at as short a distance as 8 light minutes.
The FBI swooping in on a Blackhawk means that “time” was a factor in the “effectiveness” of their response.
That the FBI shut down the post office is really interesting. Makes me think someone (unidentified) was trying to get the word out, about something, and the FBI was called in to rapidly shut down efforts to communicate beyond the observatory. Shut down the post office and check all the mail, shut down RF comms (guys on the antenna) and go over the facility with a fine tooth comb to find any memory stick or any “virus” program hiding in a computer somewhere ready to send data out to the web when reactivated.
It also wouldn’t surprise me to learn that every solar observatory in the world has someone, like their director, who’s job is to erase such data. What would it look (to the outside world) like if this designated person at Sunspot AZ contacted the “authorities” and said “we got a ‘rogue’ trying to get the word out, I need help to shut this thing down”?
How about this: what if data collected from the preeminent solar telescope did show we’re heading into a Maunder Minimum; mini ice-age for next 100 years or so? I just read before this FBI episode that solar astronomers had discovered a new solar feature deep in the Sun. Don’t remember the details, something about a new, big convection cell or something.
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