The Very Large Array Radio Telescope near Socorro, NM.

Hip, Hip, “Array”

    Today we set off on a road trip that will take us from a zero day to ground zero. The day dawned gray with a chill, but offered a taste of what is to come this week with the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. It doesn’t officially start until Saturday but this morning volunteer balloonists, in the true spirit of community, are scheduled set up their craft and inflate them at every elementary school in the city. The Painted Sky School is just two houses over from where we are staying.

    Fortunately, last night’s showers have moved on for drier pastures. Despite some ground fog, the cloud ceiling is high and there is barely a wisp of wind.

Around 7 a.m. a large white pickup truck drove out onto the school’s artificial turf playing field and began unloading the gear. First, a giant tarp went down to protect the actual envelop of the 80-foot tall nylon balloon. After an initial fill with air from a giant fan, the propane burner ignites with a deafening roar and the heated air expands the bag which stands up in less than a minute. The wicker pilot basket is tethered to the pickup just to be safe.

    With intermittent blasts of flame, the pilot gives it just enough lift so that the basket floats just a few inches off the ground making it easy to move around.

Scores of the school’s 400 plus kids gather round with their parents to see it up close and ask the pilot and crew questions.

    When it’s time to start class, the kids race off and the balloon is allowed to settle to earth. It will be one of more than 600 that will take to the local skies in the coming days.

After lunch Roxie, Mary and I strap ourselves into the Urban Assault Vehicle (UAV) for the run South to Socorro where we’ll spend the night in a rental house before going to the Trinity Test Site open house Saturday morning.

    We decide to take a 110-mile side trip, however, to one of the wonders of modern science, the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope that occupies center stage in the Plains of San Agustin, a remote 55-mile by 15-mile valley.

    The views on the trip are spectacular as billowing black clouds spread sheets of rain and verga across the desert on both sides of the highway. Sunlight dances on distant peaks while an occasional lightning bolt booms to the ground reminding both heaven and the earth who is boss.

    Built in 1972, the VLA is comprised of 27, 82-foot dishes that weigh 230 tons each. Each is mounted on a set of double railroad tracks that form a gigantic letter “Y.” When unfurled to the max, it forms a receiver equivalent to a single instrument 22 miles in diameter.

    It has helped expand knowledge of black holes, voids in galaxies and advance the understanding of interstellar physics. Perhaps most interesting is the Array’s involvement with SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The Array can be used as a gigantic cosmic ear, connected with thousands of personal computers around the world to scan hundreds of thousands of electronic frequencies for patterns, a rare and unnatural find in the chaos of the cosmos. If ET every does actually decide to phone home, the first place to hear it just might be a lonely antenna pointed skyward in this remote valley in New Mexico.

      It should be no surprise then that the VLA has made cameo appearances in many science fiction movies including Independence Day, Armageddon, Terminator Salvation, and Contact, starring Jody Foster who, coincidentally narrates the film in the visitor center.

    Some worry that efforts to find and contact other civilizations might attract the attention of murderous aliens who will swoop down to enslave us and seize our resources. That’s the popular fiction view which, according physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, is to be expected. He explains that we see aliens as warlike conquers because that’s the kind thing we would do.

    In fact, anyone advanced enough to come here probably already has nearly unlimited energy and resources or could easily find what they need someplace else without having to fight over them, which, in and of itself, if a waste of resources.

    New Mexico’s connection with aliens goes way back. Is it any coincidence the VLA is located only 200 miles as the UFO flies from Roswell, New Mexico where many believed the US Air Force recovered the remains of a crashed flying saucer and the bodies of its occupants in 1947?

    Could the detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site, in July of 1945, at a spot roughly half way between Roswell and the VLA, have been the reason aliens may have wanted to keep a better eye on us?

    Of course the official government position was that there was no UFO at Roswell and that what people saw, and the pieces they picked up in the desert, were just weather balloon.

    Balloons. A-bombs. UFOs. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence. There’s a good reason to keep your eyes on the skies in New Mexico. As far as I’m concerned, the way things have been going in the world lately, scientists might want to turn those 27 giant antennas at the VLA towards Earth to see if our worst fears about there being no intelligent life in the universe might be confirmed.

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