Chapter Two

On the northwest side of Bartlesville rises a series of large hills, part of the Circle Mountain chain formed over the millenia by the Caney River. In the early 1950's, the federal government appropriated the highest of these hills, blew off the top to form a plateau, and erected several strange, cylindrical buildings capped by huge white domes and a number of low concrete buildings festooned with various antennas and microwave dishes. A concrete bunker housed a generator which supplied electricity to the entire installation. Halfway down the hill, the government built some houses, a small strip mall, a church, and a school. At the bottom of the hill, on the only road leading to the summit, a guard station was erected. A ten-foot high chain link fence topped by barbed wire surrounded the entire hill and completed the installation--a totally contained, self-sufficient compound.

The townspeople--they called themselves "Bartians" (not to be rhymed with "Martians")-- were told by the government that the compound was a "weather station" run by the Weather Bureau and had been built because of tornadoes. To date, Bartlesville had never been hit by a tornado, although Tulsa, some fifty miles due south, had been struck several times. Okay, thought the Bartians, so why not build the thing in Tulsa?

The workers on the hill rarely came into town, but there was a steady stream of traffic between the "radar base"--as it came to be known--and the municipal airport, where the government had erected its own huge hangar. The workers all wore casual civilian clothes, as might be expected of weathermen, but the base was visited often by blue cars full of U.S. Air Force officers, and the guards were all Air Police--the Air Force equivalent of MPs. Military planes took off and landed at the airport at all hours of the day and night. Strange, thought the Bartians.

After a couple of years, amidst rising speculation as to the true nature of the radar base, the Air Force changed its story and announced that the base was really part of the "early warning network," designed to detect enemy (Soviet) aircraft laden with A-bombs. This startling revelation came as no surprise to the Bartians, who had suspected something of the sort all along.

Speculation now shifted from what the radar base really was to whether or not its presence marked Bartlesville as a Soviet atom bomb target. To quell these fears, the Air Force went on a public relations campaign. They conducted tours and periodic open houses to show off the whole operation. A new, domeless antenna was built on a big concrete pedestal, complete with floodlights and blinking strobes. This antenna could be seen clearly from the bottom of the hill, so that everyone in town could see that the U.S. Air Force was doing its job of protecting the residents of Bartlesville from the evil communists. Periodically, this "public" antenna would abruptly cease its incessant rotation and slew to a distant point in the zenith where it would quiver with excitement like a dog on point.

"The radar," explained an officially cute Air Force spokeswoman, "has now locked on to an aircraft and is precisely tracking its progress. Radar operators, in the bunkers behind me"--she hooked her thumb back over her shoulder--"are determining its identification, configuration, and destination. At the same time, radar antennas located in the domes above us are tracking other...things. If the aircraft in question turns out to be friendly, as is usually (?) the case, the operators will disengage the aircraft and the antenna will resume its rotational search pattern."

To further the public relations effort, the Air Force formed alliances with the local Civil Air Patrol, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and the ham radio club, and officers from the radar base were invited to speak at civil events, churches, and on KWON, Bartlesville's only radio station. Gradually the base and its crew were assimilated into the local culture and the whole thing was essentially ignored.

Suddenly, in 1979, the Air Force announced it was closing the base because its equipment had become obsolete. The antennas were removed, the buildings were bulldozed, the fence ripped up, the guard house torn down, and the staff relocated. All that was left were the residential facilities, which were boarded up and abandoned. Eventually, someone bought the land, refurbished the houses, and opened Bartlesville's newest subdivision.

One of the radar base's electronics experts had been David Powell, a brand-new lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force with a brand-new Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. Lieutenant Powell was placed in charge of a permanent team to research and recommend upgrades to the base's complex radar systems. In 1971, then just twenty-three years old, he supervised the replacement of all the obsolete vacuum tube-based systems with modern solid-state electronics. In 1975, he was promoted to the rank of Captain and became the base's Director of Operations, a post he held for two years until he was promoted to Major and became the Base Commander.

Powell was born and raised in Bartlesville and his wife Susan had grown up in Lawrence, Kansas--home of the University of Kansas. When the Powells were given the opportunity to move from Lawrence to Bartlesville, which was roughly the same size and social elevation as Lawrence, Susan was willing and Dave was thrilled. Bartlesville was home to Phillips Petroleum Company, Cities Service Oil Company, Price Pipeline Company, the Reda Pump Company, and the National Zinc Company--all very successful organizations which attracted highly-educated employees and pumped millions of dollars into the local economy. Bartlesville at the time was designated an "All American City," but it was also the subject of several tabloid articles with titles similar to Bartlesville: City of Sin. All in all, a very exciting little burg of 35,000 academically elevated and relatively wealthy residents.

The Powells had three children during the ten years Dave was assigned to the radar base, and after twenty years of military service, he retired from the Air Force with full pension, still young enough to start another career. The Powell children attended college, got jobs, and eventually moved from Bartlesville to start their own lives. In 1989, Susan was diagnosed with cancer. Two years later, she succumbed. After her death, Dave sold their house and moved to an apartment in Bartlesville's famous Price Tower, the only skyscraper ever designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Dave traveled for a year but soon became bored without Susan, so he set himself up as a technical consultant to various oil companies, where he spent most of his time engrossed in designing new seismographic equipment for oil exploration.

The Powells had been fascinated with the Native American culture in and around Bartlesville, and they had become close friends with several Osage Indians, including Sheriff John Greyhorse and his wife Callie. Shortly after Susan's death, John invited Dave to make several trips to Pawhuska, Oklahoma to participate in various Osage Indian activities and rituals. After one of these rituals, which had involved the consumption of copious amouts of firewater designed to lubricate the flow of information, Dave and John had a conversation.

"So Dave-- what are you going to do now? What are your plans?"

"I haven't really thought about it, John. Susan has been my life. I mean, the kids are important too, but they're all scattered to the wind and they have their own families to take care of. When I worked at the radar base, I had my work to keep me occupied. Maybe I'll get back into something like that."

"I wouldn't think there'd be much call around here for a radar expert, would there?"

"Sheesh! Radar expert. If you only knew what I really did."

"What-- you weren't a radar expert?"

"Oh yes, I was a radar expert all right, but that was just a smoke screen."

"So what did you do all those years at the radar base?"

"John, you wouldn't believe me if I told you."

"Try me. I've seen a lot of strange stuff in these hills over the years."

Dave was silent for a minute. "Okay, John. Needless to say, this stays between us. Not that anyone would believe you anyway."

"Agreed. So tell me."

"Have you ever heard of something called "Project Blue Book?"

"No. What is it?"

"Was--Project Blue Book no longer exists--not in its original form, at least. It all started in 1947, the date of two flying saucer crashes in New Mexico. The government got concerned about the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors and the threat they might cause. Because of all the flying saucer sightings--everybody calls them Unidentified Flying Objects or UFOs--the government created two projects: Project Blue Book to investigate all these sightings and determine if they were a threat to the United States, and Majestic-12, to collect and analyze alien material and technology.

"Project Blue Book collected over seventeen thousand reported UFO sightings. They investigated them all and stated that most were all either natural phenomena--ball lightning, genuine aircraft, weather balloons, Venus, swamp gas, and so on--or hoaxes. They issued a public report that in their opinion, UFOs did not exist and therefore did not offer a significant threat to the U.S., then they announced that they were closing down the project."

"But what does that have to do with the radar base?"

"I'm coming to that. Regardless of Blue Book's public statements, not all the sightings were explainable--over seven hundred were unknowns. The Air Force got tired of second-hand reports and decided to conduct its own search. The purpose of the radar base, and others like it, was to search for, and identify, UFOs, as well as other supposedly alien activities."

"I assume that since the base was shut down in 1979, no one never found any UFOs."

"Let's just say that the base was not shut down, just relocated. Project Blue Book went underground and became a part of "Skyguard," which is, to the public, a new name for a governmental interagency group in Arizona called 'NEAT,' or Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking. Actually, NEAT is only a small portion of Skyguard. The base is still around; it's just out of sight."

"You mean it's still in Bartlesville? Where is it?"

"What's the one building that wasn't demolished when they tore down the radar base?"

John thought a moment. "The hangar! The hangar is still at the airport!"

"That's right--you have a good memory. The hangar has five levels above ground and four levels below."

"But doesn't that hangar belongs to some commercial aviation company?"

"Yes- Pendragon Aviation; they're kind of a flying circus. They do a lot of air shows with classic and vintage aircraft, and they have a aerobatics team of World War Two P-51 Mustangs and Japanese Zero's that do stunts and mock dog fights. Of course it's just a front for Skyguard."

"But where are all the radar antennas?"

"Radar technology has changed since the government built the original base on the hill. We use much higher frequencies so the antennas can be very small--small enough to fit in the penthouse of an aircraft hangar. All of our visible microwave dishes and antennas look perfectly normal for an airport hanger."

"Wow. Okay, so why was the base built in Bartlesville, of all places?"

"Several reasons: first, Bartlesville is fifty miles from the nearest interstate, so most traffic in and out of the city is by people who have Bartlesville as a specific destination. Tourism is not a significant part of the economy, so we don't have crowds of rubber-neckers roaming around. Second, we picked Bartlesville originally because of its somewhat mountainous terrain, which was important for the old radar systems. Third, Bartlesville is significantly more upscale and liberal than most cities its size, and a sophisticated radar base was more likely to be accepted there. Those reasons were important, but they weren't the main one. You said you've seen a lot of strange things in the hills around here, John. What sort of things have you seen?"

"Oh, lights in the sky, lights that flash on and off and follow your car at night, strange noises, stuff like that. I've even had a couple of people claim that they were kidnapped by aliens from outer space. I could go on."

"No need--I've heard about, and investigated, them all, including some incidents you really wouldn't believe, and I'm not talking about crop circles. The tri-state area--Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri--has been a hotspot over the years for strange activities. That's the main reason we built the base in Bartlesville."

"Jeez, that's amazing!" said John. "I never would have guessed."

"Nor has anyone else, so far. I probably shouldn't have even told you, but I know I can trust you to keep this to yourself. Well, it's late and I think I've said enough-the booze has worn off enough for me to drive, so I'd best be going. Remember, I told you nobody would believe you if you told them!"

END OF CHAPTER TWO