editor’s note: one thing missing from this piece is the amazing capture taken by the woman out of indiana earlier this week where she captured amazing structures near the sun. given the observatory in NW takes images within this realm (inner space), typically of the sun, i would say this is likely part of the reason for this strange closure. even stranger is shown in the youtube video below, where local resident’s are on site trying to figure out what’s up. one woman says homes around the observatory are empty, blinds 3/4 closed. a lot of questions remain…the other cams at the other observatories have been offline for awhile – often months. the question remains: WHY? also of interest…an XFiles DVD was left in one of the garbage cans (oddly enough at the top) at the facility – obviously wanting someone to find it. an employee of the station leaving a clue perhaps? (and you will have to excuse their rather juvenile take on the alien perspective…)
******
“There was a Blackhawk helicopter, a bunch of people around antennas and work crews on towers, but nobody would tell us anything,” Otero County Sheriff Benny House told the Alamogordo Daily News. “I don’t know why the FBI would get involved so quick and not tell us anything.”
An anonymous 4chan user who called both nearby Apache Point Observatory and the local sheriff was told that they were “locked out” of the Sunspot observatory and had no idea what was going on.
Located near both White Sands Missile Range and infamous Roswell New Mexico, speculation over the observatory’s abrupt closure has ranged from an alien mothership using the sun to “refuel”, to a devastating solar disaster such as the 1859 Carrington Event – a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) which would have undoubtedly blown out most satellites and electronics had they been invented yet.
Despite unusually high sunspot activity during an otherwise quiet period and a minor CME ejection which hit Earth last week, it appears that threat has passed, for now – as a CME takes anywhere from one to three days to hit, which brings us back to aliens and other theories. It doesn’t help that several public solar observatory cams have gone offline, including NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) which will be offline “for several weeks” in order to update the “code infrastructure that provides access to SOHO data.” ……
Continue here.
