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One of my more memorable encounters in my taxi was with an older fellow who was moving cars to sell at auction (in Scottsdale, Arizona). "How'd you find your w
by taxicabjesus 4y ago
One of my more memorable encounters in my taxi was with an older fellow who was moving cars to sell at auction (in Scottsdale, Arizona).
"How'd you find your way to the desert?" Phoenix was half-way between the labs in Los Angeles, the labs in New Mexico, and the testing sites in Nevada.
For a young single man, life on the secret bases in Nevada was pretty sweet. All the meals were the same price (steak, lobster, etc), ammunition was cheap, etc. The married guys didn't like it so much, but he was not married at the time.
Ooohhhh... Interesting. There are rumors on the internet about the federal government having extensive underground infrastructure in the western United States. This made sense to me: if you want to hide something, you put it underground. So I asked my passenger about this.
"Oh yeah, but there's way more stuff underground at Area 12 [0], than at Area 51."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Area_12_(Nevada_National_Security_Site)&redirect=no https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Area_12_(Nevada_N... (Redirect is to "Rainier Mesa", "one of four major nuclear test regions within the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS)".)
I'm partial to the idea that nothing important happens at Area 51 anymore, just your average everyday testing of the latest thermodynamics-compliant military hardware. All the interesting R&D is now done somewhere else.
Ingo Swann [1] said in his Art Bell interview (iirc), w.r.t. his self-published book [2], that the secret program he was involved with, which he couldn't prove, never even got to the point where it needed to be 'classified'.
[1] my earlier comment about Swann: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295488
[2] Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy - https://books.google.com/books/about/Penetration_the_Question_of_Extraterrest.html?id=g7brrQEACAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Penetration_the_Questio...
[edit: added [1] & renumbered links] [edit2: added clarification to wikipedia's redirect link.]
- tomphoolery 4y agoWas this man wearing glasses and an HEV suit by chance? If so, I would stock up on guns. Now.
- bitdestroyer 4y agoWake up and smell the ashes.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI mean all eyes have been on Area 51 for decades now, it makes sense they would move more sensitive stuff elsewhere. I never heard of Area 12 or any other "area" so those are still obscure enough for the mainstream.
- MikePlacid 4y ago> all eyes have been on Area 51 for decades now, it makes sense they would move more sensitive stuff elsewhere. It’s kinda law of nature, actually. If all media attention is on some spot, you can bet that much more “interesting” things are happening elsewhere. Like: - college girl suffer less sexual abuse than non-college girls; - Catholic kids suffer less sexual abuse from figures of authority than non-Catholic kids (by some probably biased reports - 10 times less); - Uber implemented more safety features in their app than Lyft (which was recently sued by some women exactly for that) - here the causality link is obvious: with media attention on them, Uber was forced to try harder. But less people would click on “Area 12”, than on “Area 51”, so it goes.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoLove your username
- taxicabjesus 4y agohah, thanks. It was inspired by one of Michael Crawford's [0] usernames at K$5 (kuro5hin.org), Zombie Jesus Christ. At first the other K5 users thought Taxi Cab Jesus was just trolling Michael. But really the point was to post diaries about my days in the taxi. I was focused on more than the bottom line, and spent a little extra time, as needed, to help my passengers through their days. Mr. Crawford had aspirations to solve all the world's problems, and sometimes had a messiah complex. Mr. Crawford was brilliant (dropped out of CalTech), but troubled, on account of his poorly-treated mental illness. I visited him in the San Louis Obispo County Jail [1], because I was in the area and it was something B.J. (Biblical Jesus) said to do. My old kuro5hin.org [RIP] diaries and stories were reposted at https://www.TaxiWars.org/ https://www.TaxiWars.org/ [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MichaelCrawford https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MichaelCrawford [1] My comments on Michael Crawford's obituaries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19489570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19489570 / https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=30747&cid=819975 https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=30747&cid=819975
- dwringer 4y agoI always thought one of the more interestingly codenamed nuclear tests was Mission Cyber, the weapon effect portion of Operation Touchstone which was conducted at the Rainier Mesa test site. From what I can tell it was an investigation into the effects of an underground nuclear blast on various nearby electronic and fiber optic systems. But they couldn't have picked better names to fuel conspiracy theorists.
- fluoridation 4y ago"Thermodynamics-compliant"?
- taxicabjesus 4y agoPresumably none of the groundbreaking / fun research is carried out at Area 51 anymore. If you were a research scientist doing classified research, and invented anti-gravity, would the powers behind the scenes allow this technology into circulation? Our guys certainly wouldn't want to let the Soviets know anti-grav is a possibility. All the U.S. military-industrial complex's best toys are certainly still classified.
- yowzadave 4y agoIf they’ve invented a doomsday device, however, letting the Soviets know should be a top priority for it to function as a deterrent (per Dr. Strangelove’s logic).