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From: Kenny Young <ufo@fuse.net>
Date: Sat, 05 Aug 2000 14:48:36 -0400
Fwd Date: Sat, 05 Aug 2000 21:42:00 -0400
Subject: UpDate: Military Disputes Strangeness of Maryland Silver Balls


"In Sky Over City, Multiple Mysteries"
By Steve Vogel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 4, 2000; Page B01

OCEAN CITY, Md., Aug. 3­­The mysterious silvery balls came
first--pretty, 12-inch-diameter spheres that floated down from
the sky in and around this resort town, amid rumors that they had
been dropped by black helicopters.

This was followed by widespread alarm when word spread that the
City Council--meeting behind closed doors--had granted the
military permission to test the Patriot missile's radar at the
municipal airport.

Toss in a few sonic booms from military jets in recent days, and
some Ocean City residents are up in arms.

"They have no business putting this on in a resort community,"
said Hollis Martin, a homeowner in nearby South Point. "Go out to
the desert and do your testing."

Even Maryland's Democratic senators, Barbara A. Mikulski and
Paul S. Sarbanes, have weighed in, sending a letter last week to
Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen asking for information
about the radar testing.

"We are also requesting that the report include information on
any . . . helicopters in the West Ocean City area and the
launching of 32-ounce spheres," the letter said.

Margaret Pillas, a City Council candidate helping spearhead the
resistance, puts it more simply: "Just tell us what's happening
to us, not 30 years from now, when we learn they've done God
knows what to us."

What's happening is: Next week, at the height of the beach
season, the military will start a series of tests designed to
improve the performance of the Patriot antimissile system, known
for its decidedly mixed results 10 years ago in the Persian Gulf
War.

No missiles will be fired--or even brought to Ocean City.

Instead, jets will fly in circles far offshore, and technicians
will assess how well the Patriot's radar system tracks them, in
conjunction with radars on nearby Wallops Island and a Navy
cruiser at sea.

Ocean City makes a convenient spot for testing because of the
possibilities for triangulation and integration among the three
radar sources.

"We surveyed north and south, and the bottom line is, the best
geometry was the Ocean City airport area," said an official from
the Ballistic Missile Defense Office. The military wants to do
the tests now, during the peak summer season, to avoid delaying
missile firing tests scheduled elsewhere this fall.

Of course, none of that explains the silvery balls.

They do, in fact, exist. Pillas has one hidden in a secret
location. "It's the only actual evidence we have so far," she
said. "We don't have a helicopter yet.

This is the first thing we've had that everybody said we didn't
see."

A resident named Wendy Garliss first spotted one of the silvery
balls during the winter in a field off Route 50 near the new
Wal-Mart. She kept it in her back yard, where her dog and
children played with it. She gave it little thought until the
radar controversy erupted, when she turned it over to Pillas.

Pillas drove it around town in her Jaguar for several days,
trying to get someone to identify it. "Source of Mysterious
Balls Unknown," read a headline in a local paper.

Last week, the Patuxent River Naval Air Station identified the
balls, saying they are harmless aluminum spheres routinely
released from P-3 aircraft to calibrate radar at the Southern
Maryland installation. They have nothing to do with the planned
Patriot radar testing, according to military officials.

Phillas remains skeptical about the explanation, and today she
took a reporter and photographer to see her sphere on condition
they keep its location confidential.

"I have it buried until we know exactly what it is," Pillas said
of the ball. "I want it to be analyzed by a group independent of
the government."

The Navy has no problem with that. "Anyone who finds a sphere is
welcome to keep it or put it in with other aluminum recyclables,"
read a statement released by the naval air station.

The source of the sonic booms remained unclear. Spokesmen for
several East Coast installations said they knew nothing about
them. As for the black helicopters, no one is claiming them,
either.

City officials acknowledge that residents are not imagining
things, or at least not everything.

"I'm not going to say that the silver balls, black helicopters
and sonic booms don't exist," Mayor James N. Mathias Jr., clad
in a golf shirt and shorts, said in an interview today in his
office.

But the mayor said he is convinced that the radar tests do not
pose a danger to residents or wildlife and are important for the
national defense. "Who knows when the next time our sons and
daughters will need these weapons for protection," he said.
"This is the least the town can do."

A book-length environmental assessment conducted by the
military--released Wednesday and rushed to Ocean City by courier
early this morning--concludes that there would be "either no
impacts at all or minimal impacts that could be readily
mitigated."

"People who are at the beach or in a residential area a
half-mile away will be more hazardously affected by the sun or a
cell phone than from this radar," said the official at the
Ballistic Missile Defense Office.

The radar operation is scheduled to start Friday, though the
radar equipment probably will not arrive at the airport until
Monday and actual testing is not expected to start until
Thursday. "All systems are go," said Jennifer Canaff, a
spokeswoman for the ballistic missile office.

Officials say that the radar emits no hazard beyond a 400-foot
zone, which will be restricted, and that the testing will not
interfere with airport flights. The testing proposal got off to
a bad start May 30 when military officials briefed the City
Council on the plan behind closed doors, which angered residents
once they found out.

The council approved the proposal unanimously.

"To be quite frank, and no pun intended, I thought it would be
the patriotic thing to do," said council member Vincent Gisriel.
"Little did I realize how this would fester in the public."

Military officials said the closed meeting was the city's idea.

At a July 17 public meeting called to quell the controversy,
military officers were bombarded with questions from residents,
who also raised the issue of the silvery balls and black
helicopters.

"It's not like I'm a Greenpeace person or anything," Garliss, a
former commercial fisher, said in an interview this week. "I
don't want to see military. We're not at war. For Ocean City to
decide this whole thing without consulting the public is really
rotten."

End of article
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