170. Sighting in New Mexico

Between the summers of 1978 and 1979 Andrew and I lived in New Mexico for ten months, punctuated by one round-trip Back East sometime in-between. I can’t remember precisely when the sighting took place, whether it was in 1978, on our first trip out, or in 1979, on our return, but it was on Interstate 40 Westbound soon after it enters New Mexico.

Dusk was falling and the highway empty. Scrubby desert to either side with no habitations or other signs of human life. If I remember right, some curves and topography seemed to be starting to relieve the long stretches of straight-arrow driving over nothing but flatland, so that blue-grey shadows contoured the expanses of sagebrush and tumbleweed, the ground dipping down into little arroyos and dropping out of sight from time to time. Although I’m usually extremely unobservant, I think it was I who spotted it first: a large dark-grey, low-flying, boomerang-shaped object gliding noiselessly across the highway.  But ”gliding” makes it sound too leisurely: this craft moved with purpose, as if it knew exactly where it was going.

Andrew and I were instantly agog: had we just seen a UFO? We weren’t so far from the fabled Roswell, New Mexico, home of the 1947 Roswell Incident, and the book or the same name, which had just been published that year. Rumors and conspiracy theories about alien invaders were rife, some of them too far-fetched even for our receptively paranoid imaginations. We’d heard that the military had covered up evidence of UFO’s over the years, and that ultra-top-secret installations such as Area 51 were conducting some kind of nefarious experimentation on captured alien spaceships. We were driving through no-man’s land, controlled by the U.S. military on both sides. We’d seen signs warning motorists not to stray off the highway, but I can’t remember if they explained why, whether it was a test site or a firing range or simply off-limits to civilians—don’t ask, don’t tell. We strained our eyes into the twilight but there was no longer anything to be seen, just millions of grey dots in the gathering gloom.

There was no Internet in those days, or we would have looked it up as soon as we got back to Albuquerque, to find out whether other people had also spotted something of that description in the area. But other, more immediately pressing tasks faced us upon our return, such as attending the next planning meeting to oppose the construction of the proposed national nuclear waste storage facility, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), to be located near the Carlsbad Caverns in Southern New Mexico—not far from Roswell, as it happens. So we didn’t think further about what we had seen over the Interstate that evening until a few months later, when we recognized it in a newspaper photograph with a small accompanying news clip: it had been one of the new Stealth aircraft, possibly the precursor to Grumman’s Stealth Bomber (the B-2) or one of the two Have Blue demonstrators, prototypes of Lockheed’s Stealth Fighter (the F-117). Both turned out to have been in secret development in 1978-9 and one must have been being test-flown right at the time we happened to be driving through; no UFO from a distant planet, but, in its secret development and deadly payload, something equally mysterious and perhaps more threatening to the human race.

F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter, New Mexico

Stealth Bomber (B-2)

Living in New Mexico, one felt the presence of the U.S. military at all times. It was one of the state’s biggest employers and responsible for a large proportion of its GDP. It also owned or controlled huge expanses on land in this poor, sparsely populated state. It was all very well to protest the nuclear weapons and the military-industrial complex Back East, but in New Mexico—well, one was in the belly of the beast. This was the home of Los Alamos Laboratories, host to the Manhattan Project; of Grants, “Uranium Capital of the World,” where hundreds of mostly-Navajo uranium miners had developed lung cancer from rampant radon exposure; of Sandia National Labs, operated by Lockheed-Martin for the U.S. Department of Energy; and of the White Sands Missile Range, at whose Trinity test site, on July 16^th 1945,  the first atomic bomb was detonated, in the open air. As anti-nuclear activists, we had good reason to be paranoid.

For all its overbearing omnipresence, the military kept its operations in the state well under wraps. As it turned out, Andrew and I had indeed seen an Unidentified Flying Object, and it was only through a news leak that it was identified before the military was ready to unveil the finished product. I suspect that many rumored UFOs are, in fact, secret military projects under development, stealth-flying under the radar of public scrutiny. Perhaps some of those conspiracy theories weren’t so far-fetched after all, just mistaken in projecting their anxieties onto aliens.

(For more Tell Me Another stories set in New Mexico, see Brackish Water and Cherry Soda and Land of Enchantment.)

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102. No Nuclear News

No  Nuclear News, or NNN, was a cooperative clipping service that members of the Boston chapter of the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance ran between 1977 and 1985—for more than seven years. With subscribers from across the United States and around the world, we produced a monthly newspaper with updates on all aspects of nuclear power and weapons: the global grassroots opposition; accidents and cover-ups; the health effects of ionizing radiation; the different stages of the nuclear fuel cycle (mining, milling, enrichment and reprocessing, reactor operation, decommissioning, and waste disposal—or lack thereof); the economics of nuclear power production; security implications; industry campaigns; and government regulation. Besides the regular monthly issue we also produced periodic special issues, all completely self-supported by sales and subscriptions.

cover design by Eve Melnechuk

One of the most exhilarating aspects of the project was its cooperative nature. In exchange for a free subscription, people committed themselves to clipping relevant articles regularly from their own major newspaper(s) or sending us their organization’s newsletter.  This was in the days before the Internet, when the big city dailies were thriving. We came to know and love the independent reporting in papers like The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. We looked forward to receiving each new issue of Akwesasne Notes from the Mohawk Nation and the latest newsletter from California’s Abalone Alliance or Oregon’s Trojan Decommissioning Alliance.

Of course, all these publications were produced in hard copy only. Layout was a monthly late-night party when we cut-and-pasted, breathed the fumes of rubber cement, rolled the backs of the clippings with an electric waxer, and burned the midnight oil in our spacious industrial premises in Boston’s South End, to the accompaniment of loud punk, ska, reggae, and rock music. At first we photocopied the issues, also late at night, courtesy of a friend who operated the copy machines at a local company. Later, as our operation grew, we had the issues printed on newsprint, with higher-quality covers and centerfolds. After layout and printing came the laborious process of mailing. With the exception of the international subscriptions which we sent out by air mail to Japan, Germany, and Australia, among other countries, we shipped each issue by bulk mail, pre-sorting and bundling them by zipcode.

illustration by Jim Turner

Besides the clipping, sorting, and layout, there was the more creative work of writing the editorials and producing the artwork. Every issue had a centerfold of cartoons, many of  which were original. During our subscription drives we created special NNN giveaways—postcards and other special offers, such as perforated sheets of color-printed stamps, each one with a different nuclear weapons system on it, or fluorescent green-and-yellow bumper stickers bearing the slogan, “Uranium Kills in the Mines and the Mills.”

artwork by Jim Turner; design & printing by Andrew Melnechuk

Our subject matter was grim, but our camaraderie sustained us. How, otherwise, could we have continued to produce NNN continuously for seven years, without missing a single issue, without a penny of outside funding, entirely on a volunteer basis?  Most of us were in our twenties, and as the Reagan era dragged on into the eighties, the vibrant antinuclear movement of the seventies began to flag, we began to get full-time jobs, start cooperative businesses, enrol in graduate school, buy houses, have children, and—after seven long years of running at fever-pitch—burn out.

I remember the very last issue of No Nuclear News, a special issue on toxic wastes, which we had always included in our scope, but not to the extent that we focused on nuclear matters. It was December 2nd, 1984 and the issue had just been printed. As were preparing to mail it, Bhopal happened—the catastrophic release of methyl isocyanate gas at the Union Carbide pesticide facility in Bhopal, India that still remains the worst industrial disaster involving toxic chemicals. We didn’t know what to do; we had to get the special issue out, but we couldn’t mail it without some acknowledgment of what had happened, what was happening (what, in fact, is still happening, as tens of thousands of victims and survivors continue to suffer and have yet to receive justice). Eventually we made up a rubber stamp naming Union Carbide and registering the number of known deaths to date, and stamped the cover of each issue with it. I don’t remember much after this because I was expecting a baby any day, and he was born less than three weeks later. No Nuclear News, which had been such an important part of my life for the past seven years, rapidly became a memory, as there was now another precious something—or someone—keeping me up nights.

Before we shipped our last issue of NNN, we decided to create something to commemorate it. We produced an elegant black-and-white poster featuring a photograph of a brick wall with a shadowy figure crouching beside it, sporting a gas mask. Then, with a variety of handmade stencils, we custom spray-painted each poster, graffiti-like, with different slogans and symbols.

The former members of NNN still have a special bond, no matter how infrequently we see each other these days. Just recently, when Andrew and I met with one of our founding members, she reflected that it might be time to revive No Nuclear News. Our children are now older than we were then and the tools and technology for global information dissemination are altogether different, but the danger is as real, and the need to cooperate and communicate across national lines is as urgent as ever. Any takers?

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61. Burma-Shave Signs

It was June, 1977 and a small group of us in the Boston chapter of the Clamshell Alliance, fresh from our April 30^th occupation of the construction site of the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear power plant, decided to do something to draw public attention to the evacuation plan—or lack thereof—for the Pilgrim nuclear plant in historic Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Anyone who has driven to Cape Cod from Boston knows that the bottleneck of Route 3 and the Sagamore Bridge makes for traffic congestion all summer, and if, in the event of an accident at the Plymouth nuclear plant, the area had to be evacuated, it is impossible to imagine anything but total gridlock. People would simply be unable to get away. We thought that the best place and time to drive this point home would be in stop-and-go traffic on Route 3 South at the beginning of the July 4^th weekend.

Together we wrote a four-page informational leaflet which Eve illustrated delightfully in cartoon format. But how to increase the chance that people would actually read the leaflets, rather than throwing them in the trash? It was my now-father-in-law Ted who came up with the idea for Burma-Shave signs, a successful and long-running advertising campaign from the mid-nineteen twenties to the early nineteen sixties. A series of small placards were planted along the sides of America’s roadways, each one bearing a few words of a slogan or one line of a verse advertising the product. For example:

Your shaving brush / Has had its day / So why not / Shave the modern way / With / Burma-Shave

We all got to work composing catchy verses to prepare motorists for our informational leaflets. I wish I could find our list, but Ted’s were the most humorous and memorable. One went like this:

Governor Mike [Dukakis]/Few people wish/To have to eat/Atomic fish.

The first day of the holiday weekend started out hot and humid and grew steadily steamier. We headed down to the South Shore in heavy traffic, which obligingly slowed and thickened as we reached the Plymouth area. After planting the signs along the side of the highway at regular intervals, we found a safe place a little further down the road where we guessed that the congestion would be particularly bad. As we had hoped, traffic soon ground to a complete standstill. We were able to move from car to car handing out our leaflets, which were readily accepted by the bored and frustrated drivers, their curiosity already piqued by the Burma-Shave signs.

When traffic began moving again we too moved on, to the beach, where we distributed our cartoon leaflets to sunbathers. Again they were receptive, and we came away with the satisfaction of seeing a beachful of sun-worshipping vacationers engrossed in reading about the worthlessness of the Pilgrim nuke’s evacuation plan. Incidentally, the plan remains woefully inadequate to this day, as a report commissioned by the Town of Plymouth found as recently as 2006, nearly 30 years after our little publicity stunt. Indeed, given the location of the reactor, it is  unlikely that any plan could make it possible for the area to be evacuated in a timely manner in the event of a nuclear accident.

As I write, the Pilgrim nuclear facility (I hate the word “plant”, it sounds so natural) is in the news again. This time, new test wells have found that it is leaking radioactive tritium into the surrounding groundwater. As always, a company spokesman has assured us that there is “no danger to the public.” But our experience and the industry’s performance record warn us otherwise.

I remember one more verse from our anti-nuclear Burma-Shave campaign:

Were Robert Redford/Radioactive/He would be/Much less attractive.

 

pilgrimwatch.org

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