Quote:In a nutshell: Someone showed up two weeks ago at the National Solar Observatory at Sacramento Peak, near Cloudcroft, and told employees to pack up. They were being evacuated, along with residents who live nearby and a clerk at a post office on the site.

Nobody was told why this was happening, outside of the vagueness of “security concern,” or when they could return.

Quote:In an effort to quiet the masses, I pressed the FBI spokesman to confirm that UFOs and/or aliens did not prompt the closure. I got an email back that said, simply, “no extraterrestrials.”

Then the observatory announced it was reopening.

And, at the insistence of my editor, I was preparing to travel the four hours to Sunspot when I got a news alert from KRQE-TV: “Sunspot observatory closure linked to a child porn investigation.”

In disbelief, I found the 30-page FBI search warrant, and sure enough, it says the whole ordeal started with a janitor downloading child porn on the observatory’s Wi-Fi. The FBI had traced the signal to a janitor’s laptop and seized it from the observatory without notice.

When the janitor returned to find his laptop missing, his behavior escalated from whining about “lax security” at the site to spreading the word that a serial killer was loose in the area and would one day “execute” an employee, according to the warrant.

It wasn’t the child porn, but these subsequent threats, that made AURA decide to evacuate and shutter the observatory and nearby post office.

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This made me sit up in my chair when I heard it the other day. This sounds totally whacko. Make people living miles away evacuate their homes for this. And not tell them why? My WTF gene tells me this is BS. I don’t have any guess what the truth might be but this ain’t it.

I don't believe that story for a minute.