UPDATE 9/12/18 4PM PST The issue may be related to Mercury (the metal, not the planet). On a tip from a science journalist friend who covers telescopes and who has been there, I verified the observatory uses a vat of liquid mercury as a float bearing for the giant solar telescope. According to an internal NSO/NMSU document, that bearing is “high-risk” during maintenance. If there was a major mercury spill, it might explain why the Feds are there, with FBI providing security. The amount of Mercury is said to be in the “tens of gallons” range, which is next to impossible to come by in the commercial market these days, and if it were weaponized, it would make a very nasty dirty bomb. Perhaps there’s some security issue with the mercury on-site.
Also, the observatory is in transition, with it’s management shifting to New Mexico State University:
As part of the restructuring connected to the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKI), the National Solar Observatory (NSO) will leave the Sunspot site in October 2017. However NSF, NSO, and the larger solar physics community in USA see extended scientific, educational, instrumentation and public outreach advantages in maintaining, simplifying, and upgrading, certain aspects of the telescope and the site of Sunspot. As such, the New Mexico State University (NMSU) are leading a national effort to form and lead a Sunspot Solar Observatory Consortium (SSOC) to maintain the operations of the Dunn Solar Telescope (DST) and Sunspot site for a minimum 5 year span beyond Oct 2017.
Maybe there’s been an issue during the transition.. – Anthony
Solar telescope facility, and nearby U.S. Post Office shut down – Blackhawk helicopters seen on site
This is weird. The National Solar Observatory has a singular mission, or so we’re told:
The mission of the National Solar Observatory is to advance knowledge of the Sun, both as an astronomical object and as the dominant external influence on Earth, by providing forefront observational opportunities to the research community. The mission includes the operation of cutting edge facilities, the continued development of advanced instrumentation both in-house and through partnerships, conducting solar research, and educational and public outreach.
It’s been closed by the FBI for “security reasons” and there’s no mention of the closure on the NSO website. Not even in their news feed. Even local authorities are baffled. What could possibly be going on there that would require such a secretive response by the FBI? Some sort of suspicious package at the post office? Spies? Something they spotted with the telescope that it too explosive for the public to know about?
From a variety of wire and TV news sources. h/t to Dennis Wingo
The mysterious and sudden closure of the National Solar Observatory in New Mexico is sending alien hunters into a frenzy as the facility remains shut without explanation. The research institute in Sunspot was evacuated last Thursday along with a nearby United States Postal Service office for unexplained ‘security reasons.’
A spokesperson for the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) which manages the observatory said the evacuation was a precautionary measure due to a security issue. “It was our decision to evacuate the facility,”spokeswoman Shari Lifson added.
A statement made by the Otero County Sheriff, Benny House, to Alamogordo Daily News in the aftermath of the announcement has contributed to intense speculation around the incident, however. House said that they were asked to standby but given no further information.
“The FBI is refusing to tell us what’s going on. We’ve got people up there (at Sunspot) that requested us to standby while they evacuate it. Nobody would really elaborate on any of the circumstances as to why. The FBI were up there. What their purpose was nobody will say.”
The sheriff also claimed there was a Blackhawk helicopter at the site and work crews on towers and around antennas
Source: RT
From KVIA-TV :
SUNSPOT, New Mexico – The National Solar Observatory in Sunspot New Mexico has been closed since last Thursday.
The post office near Sunspot also remains closed. Its employees have been temporarily transferred to the post office in Cloudcroft, a USPS official told ABC-7.
ABC-7 has confirmed the post office in Sunspot will not be re-opened until further notice, and cannot be re-opened until approved by local law enforcement officials.
ABC-7 Monday spoke with Shari Lifson, who is with Aura, the company that co-manages the Observatory with NMSU. Lifson told ABC 7 there is no time-table for the Observatory to be re-opened.
ABC-7 also reached out the FBI, but did not hear back from the federal agency in time for deadline. The FBI did speak with local law enforcement about the length of the observatory closure.
“They spoke with my sergeant initially and they said that they would be down for a few days so that could be anywhere from a few days to months, from my past experience,” said Sheriff Benny House.
The FBI did not tell Sheriff House the reason for the closure.
Sheriff Benny House did tell ABC 7 that his local law enforcement did not have anything to do with either the observatory closure, or the Sunspot post office Closure.
A spokesperson for the United States Postal Service told ABC 7 that they were given specific instructions. “We were told on September 6th that we would be evacuated along with the surrounding area, we were not told why,” Rod Sturgeon said, “We were told just to be out of the area.”
More here
UPDATE: A few minutes after publication, the photo was corrected to show the Dunn Solar Telescope at the Sacramento Peak NSO facility.
The X-37B OTV mission will be landing at Holloman AFB is my guess.
9/11 closure. Let me guess, security threat.
By the looks of it all, very much so, Probably of the highest level of National security.
My money is on the fact that somebody high up at the facility, had put his packed lunch in the fridge first thing that morning, & now it’s missing, & nobody will be allowed to leave until it’s found, & somebody is going to pay for this outrage!!!!!
Maybe it is closed due to the geomagnetic storm from the current coronal holes
except its a fairly low level G and incoming isnt that high, 6.7 or so protons a second
ive seen far higher counts and wind speeds
saw this last night on Zerohedges page
the person reporting it also stateda slew of others were shut around the globe
inc Australia
i did click the link to see ?re the aussie one and it went nowhere
tis curious cos if it was mercury then climing all over towers etc is sorta the wrong direction? 😉
My guess is the FBI was acting on something they learned during a surveillance operation, and decided to secure the target rather than try to arrest someone because of the downside risk of a successful robbery. Or, someone actually did manage to make off with some quantity.
There’s an alien in the Observatory! It looks like this!
His hair is ready to go into warp drive!
And he does a nice job of impersonating Larry Fine….
Come on Dr.
That is too cheap, too easy, too obvious.
Any one can tell who that is, at the first look.
It is not an Alien….is Elon Stark.
See, too easy….. 🙂
cheers
Yup he became an alien after smoking pot
Then why were the web cams from observatories around the world shut down at the same time of this take over?
These solar/space cams (webcams) were all taken offline at the same time as the National Solar Observatory evacuation:
AXIS 2320 Network Dome Camera in Sydney, Australia, the SOAR Observatory in Chile, BRT Tenerife Telescope in Spain, the Mauna Kea observatory in Hilo, Hawaii, the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope in Hawaii and the JAT Observatory in Fariless Hills, Pennsylvania.
It’s normal for webcams to be down. It amazes me how people have completely missed the mark on this story, going off on tangents. They said from the start it’s a security issue, not a safety hazard. People trying to link it to the post office also drive me nuts. The whole town was evacuated – of course the post office was closed. It was obvious from the start it was either someone using the facility to spy or some top secret aircraft was forced to make an emergency landing on the landing field behind the town.
“and if it were weaponized, it would make a very nasty dirty bomb”
How so?
The mercury is out to get us. Be afraid, be very afraid, but the FBI (government) will save us w/Spooky Mulder and Scully on the case.
There is a battle going on between Trump and the deep state. Both sides have lots of cyber-warfare assets in play. There is not much to see on the surface of a cyber warfare facility except “towers and antennas”.
In the early 20th cent. there was a lighthouse on the Brittany’s coast (France) of which the light system worked very efficiently with burning petroleum gas. The whole system was floating on a flat basin filled with mercury (probably tens of gallons, too) on the top of the tower, and so rotated in a perfectly horizontal plan.
This worked fine until the lighthouse underwent a terrible storm with very strong winds for weeks. The tower, though very strongly built was shaken and the mercury began to overflow down the tower in the two keeper’s appartment. But there was no way for them to escape since no boat could even come close enough to the lighthouse. Only a month later the storm weakened enough allowing the men, severely intoxicated by the mercury vapours, to be rescued .
“All your base are belong to us. And your Mercury. ..” == statement released by militant “Pluto is a Planet” activists.
Since 1976 I was involved in mercury issues of all sorts. The hysteria over mercury is truly mind boggling. Some college students at one of our universities several years ago found metal mercury in an abandon van and took it back to their dormitory. The state closed the dorm, spent millions cleaning the building and testing all the students in the dorm even though it was ever only in a couple of dorm rooms. Turned out the metal mercury was destined for the Amazon were native gold miners use it to extract gold from river sediments.
Every so often I go searching for anyone that has been documented to have been poisoned by mercury in the USA. Note the standard for the level considered to qualify as poison is very low. A year or so ago I found an entire family. It was an illegal immigrant family where dad was heating mercury in the kitchen for some use probably gold plating. Interestingly the parents didn’t have high levels of mercury but the kids did.
For years during a big mercury debate with FDA they would bring up that a woman in New England had mercury poisoning from eating swordfish. According to FDA she ate swordfish three times a day for months. Even though demanded by the management council FDA never produced the actual medical records.
I do know for a fact that US EPA intended to use mercury from coal fired plants to shut down such power plants and other industries using coal combustion (e.g. steel) if AGW didn’t work. Before anyone challenges me on that “little” issue I set in three meetings where it was discussed with my mercury staff, that is until the realized I was not one of the flock.
edwin, it would be interesting to hear you expand on that last paragraph.
I remember reading a story a few years ago about a mother changing a florescent bulb (In the early days of CF bulbs) in her baby’s bedroom. She accidentally broke it. The package said it contained mercury and should be disposed of in a certain manner.
She called the number on the package.
Long story short, by the time the hazmat team was done, she was left with about a $2,000 bill.
My sources tell me that this observatory spotted a Russian flag on the sun. They are about to claim ownership – and that free energy is not going to be so free from now on
May, perhaps, might. Takes me back to my doctoral thesis i.e never commit yourself .
One possible reason why the FBI are afraid of the weaponizing of the “mercury” at the Hawaii installation, and why you should be too.(j/k)
Skip to 8:58.
Story is now on CNN, 3 days late.
It doesn’t take a week plus to search for a security threat/clean up mercury/investigate spying, but what DOES take a week plus is thoroughly scrubbing data – not just from HDDs but from paper copies and file cabinets, etc…
The NSO didn’t discover aliens, what it discovered in its routine study of sunspots was a causal link between sunspots and global warming. Since the political system/govt has gone all in on humans as the cause of global warming, and their agenda has been mostly successful and eliminating any and all questioning of this, an impartial observatory that discovered the ACTUAL cause of global warming would present a clear threat to their agenda and goals.
THIS is why the NSO has been closed, the FBI is wiping all data, both digital and paper, from the site to ensure that the discovery is not made public. The extraterrestrial angle is just noise and distracts from the real issue..
Sunspot Observatory to reopen Monday following security investigation
I live here in El Paso,
the El Paso Times announced the re-opening this morning.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/09/12/weird-fbi-closes-national-solar-observatory-over-mysterious-security-issue/
Posted wrong link to reopening info.
https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/local/community/2018/09/16/sunspot-observatory-reopen-monday-aura-security-investigation/1330782002/
The observatory is supposed to open today (Monday, Sep. 17, 2018). The Washington Post (9/16, Zapotosky) reports that the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which is “in charge of the New Mexico solar observatory that was mysteriously evacuated and shuttered for more than a week attributed the closure to a threat posed by a suspect in a criminal investigation and said the facility will reopen Monday.” The group said in a statement Sunday that employees will return to work after “recent developments in the investigation” convinced officials that the staff was not at risk. According to the statement, “officials had been cooperating with an inquiry of criminal activity in the area” and “became concerned that a suspect in the investigation potentially posed a threat to the safety of local staff and residents.”
Its confirmed that there was a operation against criminals at or near the site and the Feds were expecting a major fire fight or something worse. They evacuated everyone to prevent cross fire or hostage situations. That confirms my previous post that the best guess is a illegal cyber-warfare entity was active at or near the site. The feds were expecting a bigger fight than they got. https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/article218527420.html
From Fox News 9/20/18:
“The National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, abruptly closed Sept. 6 over an undisclosed security issue. The lack of explanation fueled conspiracy theories, given the facility’s close proximity to Roswell – the location of a supposed UFO sighting in 1947.
An FBI officer said she was “investigating the activities of an individual who was utilizing the wireless internet service of the National Solar Observatory … to download and distribute child pornography.”
Officials on Monday said the observatory did not communicate with the public during the investigation because they didn’t want the suspect to be tipped off. “[O]ur desire to provide additional information had to be balanced against the risk that, if spread at the time, the news would alert the suspect and impede the law enforcement investigation. That was a risk we could not take,” officials said.
Investigators determined the observatory’s janitor had used his laptop to connect to the facility’s wireless internet system, an FBI affidavit said. Federal authorities obtained a warrant to the search the suspect’s residence, Reuters reported, citing FBI records.
On Sept. 14, FBI agents removed three cell phones, five laptops, one iPad, an external hard drive, and other electronic devices, from the suspect’s home, FBI records showed. An FBI spokesman said the case is still under investigation. According to the FBI, the suspect has not been arrested or charged.”
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/09/20/new-mexico-observatory-shut-down-amid-fbi-child-porn-investigation-documents.html