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Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2003 8:38 AM
Subject: RE: candidate conversion incident...probably not
Marcia,
Sounds suspiciously like use
of scalar interferometry to form "fake" targets.
A radar does not track a
target; it tracks (hopefully) a signal reflected from that target or
that location.
Given a signal coming from
that location, radars will triangulate and show it as a "target".
No target is there, just a
signal.
Natural interferometry in
the earth sometimes does this in a fixed location. In the old Hawk
system, after I had the Hawk Evaluation Team at McGregor range, my very
best radar warrant officer went on site into a defense in the U.S.
Strangely, there was a point in the sky adjacent to their defense, a
point about15,000 feet high and out from their radars at some distance,
from which a steady radar return could always be had, night and day,
when illuminated by one of their radars.
The got an Army buddy in a
small Army aircraft to assist, and tracking both him and the "target",
they vectored him right through that point. Nothing at all (nothing
material) was there.
So they just used that damn
thing as a calibration point, to do range calibration of their radars.
We had a similar thing at
McGregor Range, where an illuminating radar would "noise lock" on a
geographical area. We would warn all training battalions we were
administering firing test to, to ignore this "make and break locking"
signal, as it was just some crazy geographical feature and not a real
target.
One day, just for the hell
of it, we vectored an Army chopper right onto the site and he landed on
top of it. Again, nothing was there except desert sagebrush and cactus.
But that damn noisy signal was there, day and night, and undoubtedly
still is.
Then one day, with a unit
ready to fire, I ordered the "Katy bird" (the aerial drone target which
was circling outside the range and waiting) in for the firing run. It
started in, and voila! Here comes another target, pretty as a picture,
and catches up to the drone and is flying along beside it. I immediately
called a "bogey on the range!) and ordered the Katy bird back into its
off-range orbit. It peeled off and did so, but the target continued
straight as an arrow toward our exact location. The big safety radar for
the range was going crazy; he had nothing on his radar at all, but I had
four radars -- two pulse acqs and two CW illuminators -- tracking that
beast and reporting continuously, all in agreement.
So me and about 20 Warrants
and technicians stepped out of our command area with our binoculars.
The "track" passed directly over us, with at least 20 pairs of eyes
scanning through binoculars. Nothing at all was to be seen. The track
continued on a straight line right on off the range, eventually
disappearing in the distance. We never found out what the devil that one
was!
Anyway, there are some crazy
things with radars, but these ghost targets being reported don't look
like "false targets" due to slight radar malfunctions. Instead, they
look very suspiciously like those same jokers engineering our weather
just having an additional area of fun and games. Probably seeing what
the error rate of the controllers are, and upping that until they get a
mid-air collision or crash, etc.
I think I remember several
previous "ghost targeting incidents" from a couple or three years ago,
etc.
Cheers,
Tom
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