Antarctica - Not Far Enough Away

[Snarl]

Pretty cool about that laser.  But you said "something like a laser beam." So you only saw the aftermath, and not the apparatus itself?  Bummer.  And this was the late 80s?  And yet they said they don't have the capability to strap those things to fighter jets yet.  Maybe that is the case.  How much power can you realistically get from something small enough to be on a jet?  Warships, on the other hand...or a giant jet, like a C130 maybe.

Well, I'll tell you a little about that. One of the first things we had to deal with was our facility security clearance. To get there the SPO and I traveled ... see what we could get the gist of that was working and copy what looked good for ourselves. One of the places we visited was the National Ignition Facility. That's the place they're trying to use lasers to start a fusion reaction. Their laser (end-to-end) wouldn't fit on an airplane ... not with all the junk it took to get it fired up.

Anyway, the one our guys were working on had maybe a 10th of all that. I'm not a scientist and it wasn't my job to pry around or get in people's way. I have no idea if the thing was a laser or Capt Kirk's phaser. I just saw it a couple of times ... before it was gone. Boss told me to go out there one day and make sure everything was all cleaned up.

Here's the good part: for some reason I saw the wall where the obvious business end that thing had been pointed. Someone had patched the drywall and it was fresh. The next room was most likely associated and it was empty too. But, that wall had entry and exit wounds that were patched. I wanted to see. And I walked down the corridor quite a ways further down. Sure enough ... 

So, I went to the end of the building. Like most army buildings, it was made of your common red brick. Harder to patch than drywall and no one had even bothered. Didn't look to me like the brick had been burned through and there was no brick debris on the ground (doesn't meant someone didn't clean it up). Just a nice clean hole. Looked like it was supposed to be there it was so clean. Walked in a line to the perimeter fence and it had sheared a link out of that too. Walked out to the treeline and there were holes straight through. We're talking a couple hundred years at least.

They're lucky that thing didn't kill anyone.

Holy shit.  Like an industrial lightsaber or something.  It's interesting how clean everything was that it went through, including the brick, leaving no debris.  I know this is a long time ago, but did you look at the inside of the hole of the brick wall, was is shiny, or just look like clean, drilled brick?

Looked really good and shined my flashlight into the hole even. It was neither burned nor vitrified. Just a real clean hole ... like the brick was made that way. Bet it's still that way to this day.

Often regret not walking back deeper into the treeline, but I was in civilian clothes and all I could think was, "Don't wreck those Bostonians. If you walk back there you'll shred your pants. Ain't nobody but you gonna pay for that."

I can't even guess at what might have done that.  And you said there was no debris anywhere at all right, not even from the drywall?  It's like a beam of "erase you from existence" passed through it.

I didn't see anything on the ground. And, I was glad I looked, because the colonel told me to make sure everything had been cleaned up. I took that to mean that he wanted to know all the equipment had been neatly removed ... no trash left behind in trash cans, no dumpsters overflowing with stuff that shouldn't be there. But, when I got back he hinted ... and I told him about the drywall patches and about the holes all the way out through the trees. I don't think he was real happy that I told him I had walked out there. It was almost too thorough ... and obviously, no one else had gone that far. They just stopped at the interior building walls. Also, pretty sure he went out there to look for himself ... all by himself ... and he never did like making that trek.