True Story: In 1979 the army stationed me to Kunson Air force base even though I was in the Army. I was the long distance telephone communication radio mechanic for an Air Defense Artillery Tactical (TAC) site on one of the mountains around the Air base. What a long winded name to say I set up and maintained 24 telephones to 1 secure radio broadcast to the air base and command headquarters. The base was a Hawk Missile site with 8 batteries of hawk missiles. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-23_Hawk ) One of my duties was to maintain a phone line called the hot loop. This was telephone lines that had phones connected to all missile sites and command headquarters and were always “ON” so at any time the missile gunner, site commander, battalion commander all the way to the chief of staff could communicate instantly between each other just by picking up the receiver. There were always 2 or more Tactical sites active or what is called “Hot” with radars active and tracking all flights in their sectors. The other Batteries are Stand down mode, but manned and with radars inactive ready to go active at a minutes notice. This rotated between TAC sites so everyone could get back to post one week out of every 4. Being on a TAC site usually is pretty boring, back when I was there. The only thing to do was watch one of the 2 movies we had on site (rotated 1 in 1 out every week), eat (the hot chow was brought up by truck 2 times a day), and sleep when you weren’t on duty. I used to walk off site and climb the mountain when I could, got to know that mountain pretty well. Something you may not know is that every plane built had a device “black Box” that sends out a unique signal telling what country it originates in, type of plane, plane number, etc. It is termed IFF (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_friend_or_foe ) and basically it is what lets the missile battery know who you are so it does not fire a missile at you. Be glad it is there, the hawk missile, I have been told buy a gunner, can knock a plane out of the air with a near miss of 300 yards. Like I said, normally HOT duty is BORING, not today. I was sitting in front of my radio gear retuning my back up set and running multiplexer checks of the Comunication (commo) gear, when I heard the warning sirens went off. At first I thought it was a drill, but since it was common practice to stay in our bunker during a live fire alert, I decide to grab the hot loop phone I had and listen in. according to the radar guys we had picked up a low flying UFO that did not respond to IFF or radio interrogation requests, the site commander reported this to headquarters and we were told to wait for approval to fire. We were told after about 30 seconds that there were no “friendly” aircraft supposed to be in our area, nor any on radars anywhere else. We given permission to fire on the aircraft and right at about that time a new voice come on and yelled “cease fire, cease fire”. One of our gunners had broke into the conversation and stopped us from firing. Apparently the gunner had left the battery bunker to watch the missile fire as he was new and had not seen one fire before. Now if we had fired, the back blast from the missile would have injured him severely, or possibly killed him, the reason we were supposed to stay inside. Luckily for us he had went out, his story as he told it. “I was watching the missile track the UFO, it moved left and a little down, then it stopped, moved right and a little down, did it one more time to the right. So I moved to look down the side of the missile to see what it was tracking. When I did I could see our mess hall trunk driving down the switch back road on the next mountain over coming to us. So I ran and called a cease fire.” Yes, when the truck came over the horizon at about the top of the mountain, it had presented a radar image, so out tracking radars had “locked” onto it. Well trucks don’t have IFF or anything else. We had a UFO. The radar and computer system did exactly what it was supposed to do, but wasn’t a plane that it locked on, and since nobody was supposed to go outside…….. Needless to say, our cook wasn’t too happy about being an almost casualty. Moral to the story, if you’re driving in the mountains, make sure you bring your IFF
Posted on: Sat, 22 Jun 2013 02:48:41 +0000
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