[Peace-discuss] Who fried the car locks? (fwd)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Some surprise, not to say skepticism, was expressed at the meeting
tonight as to whether the following matter really counted as an important
news story from the week, so it seemed appropriate to me to provide more
information... Regards, CGE]

	So, who did fry those car locks?
	By Roger Franklin
	March 7, 2004

Even in a town where the lovestruck can select from a roster of Elvis
lookalikes to marry them at 4am, what happened three weeks ago in Las
Vegas was pretty strange, even by the locals' standards. Late on the
morning of February 21 - nobody is too precise about the exact time,
initial location, or actual identity of the first caller - someone rang a
locksmith and complained the remote-control locking system on the caller's
late-model car was refusing to respond. The old-fashioned key, linked to
the same circuitry, wouldn't work either, so could the locksmith send over
a technician to fix whatever had gone wrong? A couple of minutes later,
another locksmith's phone rang. Different caller. Same problem. By the end
of the day, the best estimate is that police, fire brigade, locksmiths,
car dealerships and tow-truck services had received at least 200 calls
from motorists, and many who are still puzzling over the February 21
incident put the figure as high as five times that. "Maybe it's those
little green men," joked Mike Estrada, a spokesman for the US Air Force's
Nellis Air Base, about 160 kilometres north of Vegas. He was referring to
the fabled Area 51 military research facility, which sits smack in the
middle of Nellis's bombing range and where UFO buffs, conspiracy theorists
and nutters of all persuasions have long maintained that the Pentagon
picks apart space aliens and their crashed flying saucers. This time, the
likely culprit, according to some, was a top-secret test of equipment
intended to fry an enemy's circuitry. Is this the biggest exercise in
paranoia since a drug-addled Hunter S. Thompson mistook the desk clerk at
Circus Circus for a man-eating lizard?

* * * *

Solar flares and static electricity have both been ruled out. Thus, by
default, speculation returns to the rumoured goings-on at Nellis. And
there, even though the evidence is circumstantial, the trail that begins
in the desert is littered with tantalising clues. Take what happened in
March 2001, when the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson returned to its home
port of Bremerton in Washington State. Car locks went crazy there, too,
although in a much smaller area.

* * * *

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/06/1078464695634.html