The Quiet Zone

by Stephen Kurczy

  Back at the Thompsons’ RV that afternoon, I took out my wallet and offered De a five-dollar bill, which was all the cash I had on me. “For the water and fig bars,” I said. “And for your time. I wish I had more to give you.”

  Thompson cocked his head sideways and frowned. “How about you take it and get some good greasy city food and think about me,” he said. “I can’t have it too spicy!”

  Chickens clucked around our feet.

  “Well, thanks for the water, the food,” I said.

  “Aw fuck, you’re more than welcome.”

  Thompson turned and walked across his yard—past the baby-blue trailer where his chickens roosted and into the rickety RV where he lived with Linda and their Rottweilers. I felt guilty for having been ashamed to be seen with him and concerned he might rob or kill me. He had only been generous. The guy had nothing. He didn’t even have teeth. All he had were stories. And yet he didn’t want anything from me—just wanted to share in my enthusiasm for the weird history of his county. I drove down the long dirt driveway and onto the road home to Green Bank. The passenger seat was brown with cave dust.

  Part Three

  Quiet End?

  * * *

  “Be quiet!” said Jesus sternly.

  —MARK 1:25

  * * *

  Chapter Eighteen

  “A Do-or-Die Situation”

  JENNA AND I TURNED INTO the Sheetses’ mile-long driveway, crossing over a creek and passing alongside a horse pasture. Bob and Elaine waved from the porch of their white farmhouse. They’d invited us to join them for Thanksgiving of 2018, and we’d eagerly accepted.

  We wanted to be proper guests and bring a dish, but our options were limited after several days of camping at the New River Gorge. At the last minute, we’d swung by the IGA market in Marlinton and purchased two sad-looking, machine-pressed pies in plastic clamshells. Elaine politely accepted our offerings, though we got the sense that prefab pies were not quite worthy of the Sheetses’ table. Our wannabe dessert was tactfully disappeared, never to be seen again that evening.

  We followed Bob toward the kitchen, where their three adult children and extended family were chatting. After introductions, Bob asked if we wanted to see the deer that his youngest son, Jed, had shot two miles deep in the woods that morning. Of course we did.

  In the barn, an eight-point buck lay atop a tractor, its glassy eyes staring into space, its rear haunches severed and hanging from a rafter, dripping blood. The fall 2018 hunting season was in full swing. Earlier in the day at the IGA, we’d parked next to a Jeep Wrangler that appeared to have two broomsticks protruding from the back window. I looked closer and realized they were deer legs. At Marlinton Motor Inn where we were staying, a sign said “Welcome Hunters” and the receptionist was dressed in full camo, as if she’d come directly from the woods. The sidewalk outside our room had a large dark stain, as if someone had gutted a deer there.

  Beyond the Sheetses’ barn, I could see the Green Bank Telescope standing like a sentinel, its red beacon blinking even brighter into the longest nights of the year. It was surrounded by a patchwork of copper-colored hayfields and frozen pastures, a haven for deer. Hunters had complained of losing access to this 2,700-acre federal property when the government established the observatory. As a way of appeasing hunters as well as culling the deer population, the observatory began hosting an annual hunt in 1993. So many people showed interest that a lottery determined who could participate.

  I had attended the previous year’s weekend-long hunt, standing by as 172 people armed with rifles and bows prowled the fields and woods around the telescopes. Everyone had been asked to put their smartphones on airplane mode. In a parking lot, I had found a bowhunter named Ryan Repp stuffing forty pounds of still-warm meat into a large plastic bag. Usually he took a photo of his kill and texted it to his wife, but this time she’d have to wait until he got out of the Quiet Zone. “I like it because there’s no distractions,” Repp had said of hunting in Green Bank. “You don’t have to worry about getting a call or email from work every twenty minutes.” Behind another building, I had found a father skinning a deer with his two sons. They took out a battery-powered Sawzall and began dismembering the animal. “You want these legs?” the dad asked me, holding up the deer’s severed limbs. “You can make a gun rack out of them.”

  With the observatory still under review by the National Science Foundation, the threat loomed of the telescopes being decommissioned and the area returning to a haven for hunters. Such had nearly happened once, thirty years before our Thanksgiving with the Sheetses. In November 1988, the observatory’s biggest telescope collapsed, threatening to bring the entire facility down with it—with lessons for the battle that the observatory faced today in staying open.

  THE NIGHT OF NOVEMBER 15, 1988, Elaine Sheets’s mother was sleeping in a guest room during a visit to Green Bank when she was stirred awake by a swooshing sound. She got out of bed, walked down the creaky steps, sat in the living room, and stared blankly into the distance, wondering whether a UFO had landed in the backyard. The following morning, she was comforted to know that she hadn’t been visited by extraterrestrials. “I heard it collapse! I heard it!” she told Bob and Elaine when they broke the news of the collapsed telescope. “I didn’t say anything because you would have thought I was crazy.”

  Or maybe it was a visit from aliens? The front page of the national tabloid Weekly World News reported on the telescope’s collapse with the headline “Zapped! . . . by Hostile Space Aliens!” Another tabloid, Sun, reported:

  One of the world’s greatest telescopes was crumpled like a toy by a blast of energy from outer space. The reason? Angry space aliens were fed up with our scientists spying on them! Ufologist Nathan Garvade says there’s no other explanation for the mysterious collapse of the 300-foot radiotelescope that turned the powerful instrument into a twisted and mangled mess in Green Bank, WV.

  An official analysis determined the scope collapsed because of a fractured steel gusset plate located in a critical spot of the support structure. If anything, it was impressive the telescope operated as long as it did. Designed and built “quick and dirty” (in the words of a former official) between 1961 and 1962 for a bargain $850,000 as part of a rush to expand the observatory’s operations, the telescope had exceeded its projected life span five times over. More than one thousand scientists had used it over its lifetime to make some of the most important astronomical findings of the century, including the detection of a pulsar in the Crab Nebula (the first pulsar associated with a supernova). Data from the telescope had also allowed staff scientist J. Richard Fisher to help develop a now famous correlation—known as the Tully-Fisher relation—between the luminosity of a galaxy and its rotation rate, which further established a link between a galaxy’s dark matter and visible matter; it was a major contribution to understanding the size and age of the universe. For many years, the three-hundred-foot scope had been the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. In 1988 alone, 120 astronomers from around the world had used it.

  The scope’s demise threw the future of the entire observatory into question. (It also caused alarm at Sugar Grove, where a 150-foot antenna was based on a similar design.) The National Science Foundation had already considered diverting money from Green Bank to fund “higher priority facilities,” putting the observatory on warning that its days were likely numbered. Without the three-hundred-foot telescope’s capabilities, astronomy in Green Bank was even more limited to an aging collection of outdated instruments.

  “If the 300-foot is not replaced, the damage will resonate through astronomy for decades and perhaps centuries to come,” the radio astronomer Gerrit Verschuur wrote in Astronomy magazine soon after the collapse. He continued:

  The telescope was located in the National Radio Quiet Zone, unique in the world, and if radio astronomers back away from exploitation of this national resource they will lose credibility in the face of other interests who hunger for unrestricted a
ccess to critical bands in the electromagnetic spectrum which currently allow us to study the distant universe. Once this Quiet Zone is lost we may never see another created anywhere on this planet.

  In retrospect, the telescope could not have collapsed at a better time. By chance, West Virginia was just then assuming a new level of political clout in Washington, D.C. Robert C. Byrd had recently become majority leader of the U.S. Senate and was about to be named chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, giving him control of the government’s purse strings. The state’s junior senator was Jay Rockefeller, who held a high-ranking post on the Senate committee that authorized funds for the NSF. Byrd and Rockefeller wielded outsized influence on Capitol Hill for their home state, and they acted fast to help the observatory.

  “Green Bank is a unique research site—and an ideal location for a radio telescope—because it is a national radio quiet zone,” Byrd said in a statement days after the collapse. “We cannot afford to lose any time in moving forward with replacing this important scientific resource.”

  Rockefeller toured the site and vowed in a handwritten memo to the observatory’s director, “I will do everything I can to help put a first-class dish back in place.”

  In early December 1988, Jay Lockman and Ken Kellermann were among fifty-six experts on radio astronomy who gathered in Green Bank to decide what replacement might be built, at what cost, and by when. “The National Radio Quiet Zone is Green Bank’s greatest advantage,” the astronomers wrote in their concluding report. “Considering sites other than Green Bank is pointless.” The scientists coalesced around the idea of building the world’s largest fully steerable telescope, with a dish 330 feet wide by 360 feet tall—moderately bigger than the old telescope but with a far greater range of motion for scanning the skies. For Green Bank astronomers, it was like having a jalopy replaced with a Ferrari.

  The NSF, seeing that Byrd was pulling together money for a big investment in astronomy, wanted to replace the old telescope with a laser interferometer to detect gravitational waves from stellar objects, a project known as LIGO. Byrd had to choose: LIGO or a telescope?

  According to a February 1989 memo from the U.S. Library of Congress’s Science Policy Research Division, LIGO would require few people to operate, while a new telescope would preserve Green Bank’s hundred-plus staff. LIGO’s potential detection of gravitational waves would likely result in a Nobel Prize (as would happen in 2017), but that prize would need to be shared among several sites and universities, diluting the prestige to Green Bank. By contrast, a new telescope was “likely to result in many important if not fundamental scientific findings.” Scientists expected the telescope to discover new stellar radio sources and extragalactic chemicals, and reveal the nature of pulsars and unknown galaxies “hidden” by dust and light. The only comparable telescope in the world was in West Germany (the country was divided at the time), but the surrounding area was so noisy that German astronomers had been traveling to West Virginia to collect data, according to the memo.

  “Green Bank is the only observatory in a truly radio quiet area and there is unlikely to be another such zone,” the memo stated. “Pressure exists from radio and TV broadcast interests, and from mobile radio telephone interests to reduce or eliminate the Green Bank zone. Such pressure is likely to increase if the 300 foot telescope is not replaced in a timely manner.” In other words, if something didn’t quickly fill the void left by the old telescope’s collapse, noise would. “I feel the observatory is here facing a do-or-die situation,” Green Bank’s site director, George Seielstad, wrote in a memo to Byrd’s office.

  Byrd and Rockefeller threw their support behind a new telescope, which they said would be “the best promise for jobs, education, tourism, and scientific prestige.” Byrd called for an emergency appropriation of $75 million. He still had to convince Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, who chaired a subcommittee that oversaw the NSF.

  In an April 5, 1989, letter to Mikulski, Byrd touted the proposed telescope’s “location in a radio quiet zone which assures a very low level of interference when making astronomical observations. The Green Bank observatory is unique among radio telescopes in the world in this aspect.” Additional letters to Mikulski came from scientists across the country, including Bernard Burke, an astrophysicist at MIT who had participated in the site selection of Green Bank in the 1950s and later served as president of the American Astronomical Society. Burke said it would “be virtually impossible” to recreate the Quiet Zone.

  Mikulski approved the funding request. But if the astronomy community appeared united around the idea of building a new telescope in Green Bank, such was also a political necessity. It was understood that Byrd would fund a new telescope only in West Virginia. In truth, a number of American astronomers believed that a big scientific investment would have been more useful elsewhere.

  “There’s no question [a hundred-meter telescope] would have been better in New Mexico,” Kellermann, the former assistant site director in Green Bank, told me. A high-elevation desert climate was generally more conducive to radio astronomy, which was why the Very Large Array was established in New Mexico in the 1970s. While the Quiet Zone provided regulatory protection from human interference, it could do nothing to change Green Bank’s climate of snow, rain, and clouds that inhibited measurement of short wavelengths. West Virginia is one of the cloudiest states in the country, with the city of Elkins near Green Bank seeing cloud cover nearly 90 percent of the year. “But Senator Byrd wasn’t going to pay for a telescope in New Mexico,” Kellermann said.

  Construction of the new telescope took a decade—double the projected time—and went $29 million over budget, putting the final price tag close to $100 million. In August 2000, Byrd cut the ribbon for the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. Two years later, he appropriated another $8 million for a new dormitory and visitor facility named after his wife, Erma. If articles about the telescope didn’t mention Byrd’s name, his assistant was known to call the observatory’s staff to, in essence, remind them whom they owed their jobs to.

  “The three-hundred-foot telescope’s collapse was such a shock that it allowed things to happen that otherwise would not have happened,” said Lockman, who kept a giant bolt from the wrecked telescope on his office windowsill as a reminder of how a single weak point could threaten the downfall of an entire facility. It was also a symbol of how what appears ruinous could be lifesaving. “The whole site would probably be closed by now otherwise,” Kellermann said.

  FAST-FORWARD TO THE PRESENT DAY, with the observatory again facing the threat of closure. With the death of Byrd, Green Bank had lost its great patron, and radio noise was flooding the community, eroding the Quiet Zone that had always made the location so valuable.

  With time running out for the observatory to make its case to stay open, private citizens were stepping up to offer support. A West Virginia student crafted homemade dolls that looked like astronomers; they were sold at the observatory’s gift shop, with proceeds going to the facility. The observatory started a private membership club, and the first to sign up was William Mullin of New Jersey, who told me he personally donated nearly $1,000 to the facility because he felt connected to the astronomical work happening in Green Bank. He’d grown up near where Karl Jansky first discovered stellar radio waves in 1933, and it was heartbreaking for him to imagine Green Bank’s “world-class instrument not being used to significantly advance radio astronomy.”

  Scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Stanford University, Harvard University, the European Southern Observatory, and the California Institute of Technology had written a joint letter in support of continued NSF funding for the Green Bank Telescope, calling it “a unique scientific resource for the US community” with unmatched capabilities. Hundreds of community members had voiced support for the observatory during public meetings hosted by the NSF. Electrosensitives were also speaking up.

  “There is a relatively large community of people who have been
injured by wireless radiation and who have sought refuge in the Green Bank area,” Sue Howard, the electrosensitive from New York, wrote in a letter to the NSF. “Where exactly do you think these people should go if the Green Bank Observatory were to close? For us, this is not about losing a job or having to move. This is about our very survival.”

  Behind the scenes, Green Bank had a much more powerful ally than scientists or electrosensitives: the National Security Agency, the intelligence-gathering arm of the U.S. Defense Department.

  “Remember, we are only the face and not the power behind [the Quiet Zone],” Karen O’Neil, the director of the observatory, had said during a 2017 conference in Green Bank. “The power behind the National Radio Quiet Zone is increasing the frequencies in which it is interested. For those of you who don’t know, the Sugar Grove facility . . . is now owned by the NSA and they are increasing their usage of it as time goes on. The NRQZ is not in any danger.”

  But that didn’t mean the observatory’s own financial support was assured.

  IN THE SHEETSES’ DINING ROOM, two tables were pulled together to accommodate sixteen of us and our heaping plates of turkey, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, spinach salad, cranberry sauce . . . There was certainly no store-bought anything. Bob’s brother-in-law said a prayer: “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, whoever eats the fastest eats the most.”

  After dinner and most of the guests excused themselves, I mentioned to Bob that I’d swung by the Pocahontas Times and spoken with editor Jaynell Graham. She had caught me up on local happenings, including a disturbing incident: a woman with electromagnetic hypersensitivity was recently found dead in the woods near the observatory. Graham didn’t know the woman’s name, only that she was an outsider.