It’s enough to make you think: Why does the observatory need an airplane landing strip, anyway?Īt one point, Kurczy recounts an ominously vague suspicion from one of Green Bank’s residents: “There’s always been a sentiment among people in the community…that there’s something going on over here-that there’s something buried under the mountain.” Kurczy doesn’t break news of a secret bunker system, but he does unearth plenty from the mountain, gradually showing that the Quiet Zone’s conspiratorial intrigue is far less interesting than its unforeseen consequences. Just an hour away, the Quiet Zone also contains the once-secret Greenbrier bunker, built to house Congress in the event of a nuclear holocaust. While the project was officially scrapped in 1962, the site later evolved into an NSA listening station called Sugar Grove (Laura Poitras offers a wonderfully meditative snapshot of it in her documentary short Timberline), which sits conspicuously close to some awfully large radio telescopes. It sounds far-fetched, until you learn that the Quiet Zone was originally established in part to house a Naval radio telescope intended to surveil Soviet radar and radio signals reflected off the moon. But then he takes a nosedive, surveying conspiracy theories and prospecting for shards of truth in local rumors about a secret network of bunkers hidden literally underneath the observatory. The Quiet Zones is a slow burn, and Kurczy opens with a wide view of the surface: an administrator details the zone’s complex and uneven enforcement the local Dollar General store coats its exterior in conductive lead paint in order to be able to use wireless inventory scanners. Kurczy finds high drama and dark secrets in the woods, but he also captures the complex beauty of a disconnected way of life that is dying out at an alarming rate. Part folk history, part gonzo travelogue, The Quiet Zone colorfully annotates an elaborate contradiction: a last bastion of the disconnected world, making its final stand at the foot of a 485-foot radio telescope that astronomers use to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So it goes in the federally protected dead zone, which journalist Stephen Kurczy exhumes in an expressionistic new work of nonfiction. I never ended up photographing that telephone booth. At the time, I was mostly concerned about running late to the tour. This would later take weeks of back-and-forth to resolve, as Pocahontas County still processed the relevant paperwork by hand. The deputy couldn’t run my information either-no wireless data transmission-so he handed me a citation and explained that I would need to provide the county clerk’s office with proof of documentation covering the time when it was issued. Because the telescopes are sensitive to terrestrial electrical interference, the area within a few miles of the observatory is the most restricted section of the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile slice of rural Appalachia where radio transmitters, from cell towers to Wi-Fi, are specially regulated by the federal government.Īs a sheriff’s deputy approached my van, it dawned on me that I normally rely on digital proof of insurance and registration, which I couldn’t pull up in this part of the Quiet Zone. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT, or the “great big thing,” in local parlance). Green Bank, W.Va., is home to America’s flagship fleet of radio telescopes, which look like enormous satellite dishes-including the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world, the Robert C. The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence
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