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Amazing Secret Revealed: UFOs, Radios, and TVs (Contributed by John Karonika) This is a true story about how strange electromagnetic waves took control over the radios and TVs in a house on Boyce Street during the summer of 1958. Until now, this has been a secret that has lasted over 40 years! It is time to set the record straight and tell the story behind the story. In the summer of 1958, my brother, Tom, made a small transmitter from a kit (got it from a Popular Science ad) that could tune across the broadcast band - and had a range of about 200-300 feet. We liked science and in our teen years we dabbled in electronics. In those days, we learned a lot of interesting things about electricity from books checked out from the Denver Harbor library! Tom built a special antenna and placed it outside the window of our bedroom. He then hooked the small transmitter up to an old 1940-50 vintage "RCA Victrola Phonograph" that he fixed. He then placed a 33 1/3 record (remember those?) of classical and opera music he found somewhere on the turntable and turned it on. Next he tuned to the very same frequency that a couple of boys - Marvin and Tommy McGee, who lived two houses down - had their radio set turned, K-NUZ. They played their radio very loud so there was no problem verifying that it was playing opera music. You could hear them screaming over at our house trying to figure out what was wrong with the radio. They would tune to another station and my brother would change the transmitter frequency and follow. This went on for about 20-30 minutes and they would turn the radio off. Every week or so throughout the summer Tom would do this. You could hear them shouting, "There it is again!" and "What's wrong with this radio?" and "I didn't do anything to it!" and then . . . silence. They would give up and turn the radio off. We laughed so hard our sides hurt. Tom would also vary the records so they got something different each time. At other times he'd play the same song over and over and over. They even changed radios. We heard one say, "This one is doing it, too!" Tom wouldn't do it every day - only when a baseball game was on or when popular rock & roll music was on. The McGee boys told us about their strange-behaving radio and how at critical times when a favorite baseball player was just about to bat the radio would go crazy and play strange music. Their sister, Pat, knew of the problem but had never experienced it herself. So, one day when she was in their back room listening to rock & roll on KILT, my brother jammed it. All we heard was, "S**t!" then silence then the sound of a door slamming. Of course, we listened attentively to the McGees when they told us about their radio problems. We volunteered that it might be UFOs sending signals or that aliens had control of their radio. They did not rule it out. They never knew what was going on. Even to this day. Until now. Well, Marvin, Tommy, and Pat, now you know the rest of the story! As an aside, my brother, Tom, found a frequency on his little transmitter that would jam TV signals as well - just the video, not audio. Channel 2 as I recall. It would cause the TV screen to be filled with wavy lines and distorted images. (If you have studied radio waves then you probably know that his jamming frequency was some harmonic and was filling the airwaves with a broad range of noise signals!) Our parents became - unknowingly - part of the research as we jammed our own TV set. I helped as much as I could. My brother then decided that he needed to increase the range of the jamming signal to jam the McGee's TV set. My brother and I bought a surplus amplifier for $4 at the Army-Navy store on Navigation across from Sears. Tom set it up and began doing experiments to see how far the phonograph music could be heard. It could be heard all the way to the far end of "the woods." He then switched back to the TV jamming mode. It made a mess of our TV signal and think that it did the same to the McGee's TV set (and other neighbors also) - but we never heard. Those old TV sets always had video problems and it was probably not even noticed that much. They probably did what our parents did - adjust and adjust and then again readjust the horizontal and vertical hold on the TV set. We planned to try the radio and tv jamming again after school began in the Fall of 1958 but the transmitter developed electrical problems. We never did it again. What's more, all available evidence suggests that about the same time the UFOs left and never again returned to Denver Harbor. My brother, Tom, went on to a technical television career at KPRC-TV, Channel Two, in Houston. I went on to a career in electronics and teaching. For my brother, Tom, and I, it all began right there in Denver Harbor. All you needed was an imagination. Beverly Rivera, another former Boyce Street resident, said it best. "None of us knew that we, (by other people's standards) were poor. We were the richest kids in the world with our imaginations taking us anywhere we wanted to go. We didn't even have to leave the yard or the neighborhood. . . . We used everything we had at that time to have fun. Now we have our memories and our stories. . . ." We may have left Denver Harbor, but Denver Harbor will never leave us. Denver Harbor is part of who we are! I'm proud to have grown up in Podunk!
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