#moffet field

[todaysdocument]

Naval Air station moffet field, California. A peaceful demonstrator protesting the war in Vietnam displays his sign at the main gate of the station.

Record Group 428: General Records of the Department of the NavySeries: General Color Photographic File of the Department of Navy

As a line of cars enters the base, a lone man holds a sign that reads “Air murder is still murder.”

[atlas-astir]

In the 90's we discovered magic. I know because I've

seen the Power Point presentation, full of bezels and slide transitions. It's liminal-- like an empty school gym. The impossible within the language and tastelessness of 2005 corporate americana.

The first slide is totally blank. It comes to life with a theatricality that hadn't yet been beaten out of our Microsoft Office experience. A click and the first words fade in.

"The Next Electricity".

They got fourty-million dollars of the ballooning post 9/11 military budget. Unaccountable "defense spending" on "alternative energy research". That's how it's always framed, very carefully. They worked at Moffet Field, outside Silicon Valley. The base is home to the Air Force and NASA's Ames Research Center. At it's outside edge is a massive wooden hanger, one of only ten ever constructed to house blimps during World War Two. On paper it was sold by the Air Force to a private contractor. This stuff's all public, part of a massive whistleblower dump a few years ago. The media focused on the UFO's obviously, but I knew what I was looking for.

The Center for Alternative Energy at Moffet Field. Officially the cowboy physicists working there had figured out a new way to manipulate passive electrons, creating energy fields. Officially, it was nothing practical, but might turn into something given enough funding and time. Certainly nothing magical.

The first thing that anyone who's seen it, not the suits or the uniforms but the cowboys in t-shirts, will tell you is that it's magic. Not science. The second thing they'll tell you is that they can't go on the record.

They know what'll happen. Best case, they'll be labeled a fraud. Some nutcase who took too much LSD while working on god-knows-what for the CIA in the 90's. Worst case? Well that's Henry Ngyuen. He jumped through the reinforced window of a ten story hotel the day before he talked to Laura.

Of course, it was Laura. Some scientist at NASA begs her to meet and then jumps out his window? She couldn't resist that. She was an old-school journalist. New York Times, chain smoking, sharp suits. The kind of tenacious reporter that Tom Hanks movies are about. When she died, she left me everything she'd ever worked on in fourteen cardboard boxes. Most of them were red-herrings. They'd moved to digital in the 90's at The Times, so a lot of it was just random research on Hard Drives and SD cards. Three of the boxes were filled to the brim with honest-to-god paperwork. An instant indication something was up.

I'd found Doctor Ngyuen's death with quotation marks drawn in red ink around the word "Suicide". Interviews she'd done with NASA researchers at Moffet Field. A janitor who'd seen six men in white suits dancing on the tarmac at midnight. A handwritten note.

In case I missed anything.

L. Hillenger

Reporters don't write like that anymore. At least not ones that work for the New York Times. Efficient, brutal, catastrophically witty.

She'd known I couldn't resist.

[archaeochick]

Can't believe someone gave me clearance to visit NASA Ames today! I thought the background check would have found my very loose acquaintances with anti-government archaeologists. Got to see some cool drone aircraft researchers are using to study wildfires and the environment. Pictures will be posted!

[hpshelton]

Air Force One is sitting on the tarmac at Moffett Federal Airfield as President Obama beings a West-Coast swing. I'll see about getting some pics tomorrow.