Sunspot Solar Observatory Closure: Even The Washington Post Is Wondering, Etc.

Above, a historical front page from 1947. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

The Sunspot Solar Observatory and a nearby post office remains locked up. Nobody has said why, which is leading to all kinds of speculation.

Does it have something to do with Robert Mueller? Did the Russians hack the telescope? Aliens? Are there artifacts from the Roswell crashed UFO there?

Even the liberal Washington Post is wondering what's going on.

They wrote:

SUNSPOT, N.M. — At a small solar observatory tucked away in the woods of a national forest here, scientists and other personnel were commanded last week to leave at once. A week later, the facility remains vacant, and no one is willing to say why. 

The mysterious and lengthy evacuation, in a state known for secretive military testing and a suspected UFO crash, has spawned a wealth of speculation. 

Did the researchers spot something extraterrestrial? Was the solar telescope hacked by a foreign power and deployed to spy on, say, the state’s missile testing range? Or is there an innocuous explanation, suppressed only because of corporate and government resistance to transparency?

On Friday, the entrance to the National Solar Observatory was blocked by yellow crime scene tape and two security guards, who said even they had been kept in the dark. The guards, from Red Rock Security & Patrol in Las Cruces, N.M., did not give their names but said it was the first day the company was guarding the entrance and that only the “director and an assistant” were allowed in. There was no obvious sign of law enforcement activity.

To read more, go here.

And from the Mercury News:

Under the banner headline: Observatory mystery: ‘It definitely wasn't aliens'

An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment, referring questions about the matter to the consortium that manages the buildings. Shari Lifson, an AURA spokeswoman, said in a statement that her group was “addressing a security issue” and had “decided to temporarily vacate the facility as a precautionary measure.” She said they were “working with the proper authorities on this issue,” although she declined to specify who those authorities were. 

Lifson also declined to specify the security issue, other than to dispute the idea aliens were involved. 

The solar observatory is about a 2 1/2-hour drive from Roswell, New Mexico, the site of a now infamous crash in 1947 that the Air Force later claimed was an experiment designed to detect Soviet nuclear activity by monitoring sound waves. The incident sparked so much interest that there is now a UFO museum in the city.

To read more, go here.