The Quiet Zone

by Stephen Kurczy

  I tracked Sizemore down at his home about eight miles south of the observatory, and as we chatted on his porch he recalled stories from his time as the Quiet Zone’s top cop. Whenever he’d found an illegal source of radio frequency interference (RFI), he had gone up to the suspect’s house, knocked, introduced himself “very politely,” and asked the offender to cease and desist whatever was causing the trouble.

  Sizemore once detected noise coming from the Sheetses’ house, pinpointing the infraction to a malfunctioning electric blanket. The observatory bought them a replacement. Because RFI was often the result of faulty electronics—a short circuit, an electric arc—some in the community saw Sizemore as a free repairman, be it for a damaged electric fence or a buzzing stereo radio. The U.S. government could also be a source of interference. The National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP), a plane that acted as a “White House in the sky,” sometimes flew overhead and emitted a signal picked up by the telescopes. Sizemore raised the problem directly with NEACP, which was initially alarmed that a civilian knew the flight path of their secretive military plane. NEACP agreed to reroute when possible or give Sizemore a heads-up when flying over Green Bank; he also started sharing the observatory’s viewing schedule with NEACP so they could avoid the Eye of Sauron in Green Bank.

  In 2009, Sizemore detected noise from a Dollar General that had opened in Green Bank: the automated front door was using a microwave motion sensor. The observatory recommended the store replace it with a sensor that operated on the infrared wavelength, which was outside of what the astronomers measured. Then Dollar General wanted to utilize wireless inventory scanners, so the observatory had a suggestion: paint the entire building in conductive lead paint, which would help prevent electromagnetic radiation from escaping. It was the only Dollar General with a black facade I’ve ever seen. The observatory did similar mitigation with other local businesses. When a Green Bank medical clinic complained that its service was limited without WiFi, the observatory sent its staff to wire an internet jack into every room.

  Not everyone was receptive to Sizemore. A neighbor who’d had some of his land seized through eminent domain during the observatory’s creation once grabbed Sizemore by the collar and told him to stay off his property. A longtime schoolteacher told me he was forced to get rid of wireless speakers he’d received for Christmas, so he’d given them to his daughter, who lived a bit farther from the telescopes—but it apparently wasn’t far enough, because she was also ordered to give them up. “We can make you get rid of your stuff, it’s the law,” Sizemore told her (in her retelling).

  Some people defied Sizemore. Linda Beverage, a guidance counselor at the county high school, told me that her Green Bank home was one of the first to have a microwave in the ’80s. “The truck used to pull up and do its little thing and tell my mom that she wasn’t supposed to have a microwave,” Beverage recalled. “But my mother was a stubborn little lady, and they didn’t take her microwave.” Microwaves were a real concern. At the Parkes radio observatory in Australia, astronomers were bedeviled for nearly two decades by a mysterious radio signal; in 2015, they finally pinpointed it to the staff’s own microwave oven.

  Ruth Bland, the principal of Green Bank Elementary-Middle School from 2003 to 2011, once decided to test the sensitivity of Sizemore’s equipment by bringing a WiFi router into her office. Two hours after she plugged it in, Sizemore rolled up to investigate. Bland hid the router, never revealing that she was the culprit. When Sizemore again detected noise coming from the school, Bland invited him inside to speak to students about why they shouldn’t have iPods or iPhones in their lockers. Sizemore showed up again when he picked up interference from a classroom’s malfunctioning thermostat; the observatory’s technical shop repaired it, no charge. Free repairs aside, it was no surprise that people felt they were being monitored. “It’s almost like Big Brother is watching,” Beverage said.

  Sizemore had bigger things in mind than spying on Green Bankers. He believed he was helping astronomers expand human understanding of the cosmos, which included looking for E.T. Nearly six decades after Frank Drake launched the SETI project, the observatory was still on the hunt, and, in his way, Sizemore had wanted to help.

  “Do you believe in extraterrestrial life?” he asked me as we sat on his porch.

  “The universe is so big,” I said, “it seems unlikely that we’d be the only life to emerge in all of it.”

  “There’s got to be life,” he said. “What convinced me was seeing life develop at the bottom of the ocean without sunlight, or when you’re seeing microbes at the top of Mount Everest in frozen conditions. Life is ubiquitous. Life will evolve anywhere it possibly can. How long have we been around? That’s squat compared to the rest of the universe . . . I think there’s a good possibility that one day we’ll get that radio signal saying, ‘We’re out here.’ What frequency is E.T. going to call on? Don’t you need a place where you can access as many of those frequencies as possible?”

  Chapter Four

  “Caretaker of a National Treasure”

  “IS THERE A CENTRAL OFFICE for the Quiet Zone?” I asked.

  “I am the Quiet Zone office,” said Paulette Woody. “You’re looking at all the employees.”

  I was in the basement of the Green Bank Observatory’s office building, several floors below the telescope control room, feeling a bit like Dorothy Gale peeking behind the curtain at the Great and Powerful Oz. A pepper-haired woman in a plaid shirt and jeans, Woody sat at a modest metal desk.

  With the official title of National Radio Quiet Zone administrator, she oversaw the thirteen-thousand-square-mile area out of the most unassuming of accommodations. Her cinder block–walled office had one small window looking up to ground level. The room was decorated with photos of her kids and grandkid as well as plastic green soldiers that summer interns had hidden throughout the building as a prank years earlier. Resting on a cabinet was an award from NASA recognizing how the observatory had helped track the Doppler shift of a probe to Mars.

  The retirement of Wesley Sizemore had left Woody as the sole remaining employee focused full time on protecting and maintaining the quiet. Whereas Sizemore had gone out on patrols to monitor the Quiet Zone, Woody acted as a gatekeeper against noisy intrusions. On her desk, a computer had a background image of the Green Bank Telescope surrounded by a massive brick wall—the wall being metaphorical. There was no literal wall protecting the Quiet Zone.

  “Just because we’re in the Quiet Zone, it’s not like this shield pops up automatically,” Woody said, chuckling at the thought. “It’s not a Star Wars thing, like, ‘We’re raising shields around the Quiet Zone to stop radio frequency signals!’”

  Bureaucracy was what stopped the noise. Nicknamed the Queen of the Quiet Zone, Woody had since 2005 personally reviewed the system configuration of any type of cellphone, fixed radio transmitter, or other licensed ground-based communication over an area nearly four times the size of Yellowstone National Park. Her office wall was lined with tall filing cabinets full of applications for communications installations, documentation of a decades-long battle to preserve quiet.

  Before the advent of the iPhone in 2007, the Quiet Zone administrator typically saw twenty to thirty requests a month for the approval of some kind of communications transmitter. In the decade that followed, the figure quadrupled to an average of 120 requests a month and sometimes to as many as 400, predominantly for cell-related installations. “Cellphone technology has exploded,” Woody said. “We went from 2G analog to 4G, soon to be 5G. All those generations of things make more of a demand on the cell companies and radio spectrum usage.”

  Yet there was still only one Quiet Zone administrator, meaning Woody was perpetually buried in paperwork. If a company wanted to install or modify any fixed, licensed communications equipment in the Quiet Zone, it needed to notify Woody of the installation’s location, height, elevation, and power levels so she could run an analysis on whether it might interfere with the t
elescopes. Her ultimate decision was influenced by the topography of the landscape, because a communications system (such as a cell antenna) on the far side of a mountain was less likely to interfere. For that reason, the proposed location had to be precise. Altering the location for any reason—even if just to the other side of a fence, as had happened—meant Woody had to run the whole analysis again. She might spend anywhere from a half hour to years reviewing paperwork, checking and rechecking sight lines, heights, directivity, and strength.

  If Woody did approve a system with specified power restrictions, the observatory’s Interference Patrol Group later did a site inspection to check whether everything complied with the application. The patrol group was also on the lookout for illegal installations. Once, a patrol group member was driving to the supermarket in Elkins when he noticed that antennas had blossomed overnight on a cell tower. He photographed the site and showed it to Woody, who informed the guilty party about the Quiet Zone requirements. The company promptly turned off the system and submitted the necessary paperwork for her review.

  Woody used to be less concerned about quiet. Prior to coming to Green Bank, she did FCC license coordination for a communications provider in western West Virginia, with the goal of finding the tallest point to spray the strongest legally permissible signal in every direction. That background gave her a personal understanding of the quiet abuses happening all around the NRQZ. The zone’s eastern edge ran through the city of Charlottesville, and many communications providers had installed systems on a hill just outside the city to avoid Woody’s purview. Tower crews sometimes incorrectly installed antennas on purpose so as to provide greater coverage. Woody had anonymous sources throughout the government and communications industry who tipped her off to these noisemakers. She called her informants “my little birdies.” She reminded me of the spymaster Varys from Game of Thrones, plotting to maintain an edge over enemies.

  Woody had a unique job in overseeing one of a dozen radio astronomy quiet zones worldwide, with the others all having been modeled in some way after the National Radio Quiet Zone, which was the very first. The Australian Radio Quiet Zone, for example, was created in 2005 and mandated radio coordination for transmitters up to 260 kilometers from the Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory. China also had a quiet zone, established in 2013 and later expanded to cover a seventy-five-kilometer radius of the Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (known as FAST). China relocated some nine thousand people who lived within three miles of its telescope, while Australia’s quiet zone was in a remote desert with a human population of two. Woody, meanwhile, had an entire town outside her window that she was mandated to keep quiet by order of the West Virginia Radio Astronomy Zoning Act Code 37a and Title 47 of the U.S. government’s Code of Federal Regulations, Part 1.924a. Most of the several hundred thousand inhabitants of the greater Quiet Zone were permitted to have cell service and any other kind of electronic device because they were sufficiently distant from the telescopes. But the closer one got to Woody’s office, the quieter things got. She saw herself as a steward.

  “I am like a park ranger at Yellowstone making sure that nobody throws litter in the hot springs,” she said. “I’m a caretaker of a national treasure, it just happens to be something we can’t see.”

  One other federal quiet zone exists in the United States. In Colorado, the eighteen-hundred-acre Table Mountain Field Site and Radio Quiet Zone has been used for conducting radio and electromagnetic experiments since the 1950s, but it is one-tenth the size of the NRQZ and with far fewer protections. In the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation briefly considered trying to create another federal quiet zone around a collection of radio telescopes in New Mexico known as the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array. But the idea was quickly abandoned.

  “The opinion of the people I have consulted on this idea, both at NRAO and at NSF, is that it would not be wise to try this,” NRAO director Paul Vanden Bout wrote to Philip Smith, executive officer of the National Academy of Sciences, in a letter dated June 11, 1991. “The FCC has received a number of requests to review the status of the quiet zone we now have in Green Bank, WV, and so far has declined to do so. The Commission would, in all likelihood, vigorously resist the establishment of another.” Maintaining Green Bank’s Quiet Zone had proven enough of a headache. And that was before WiFi and smartphones.

  Pushback against the Quiet Zone regulations sometimes turned into physical confrontations. Soon after Woody moved to Green Bank in 2005, a stranger at church pointed a finger in her face and said, “You’re the reason why I can’t talk to my daughter on her cellphone.” Woody responded, “I just started a week ago and don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “How often do you have to contact the FCC about enforcement of the Quiet Zone?” I asked.

  “I try not to give that secret away,” Woody said, which I took to mean that she tried not to annoy the FCC. “Our goal primarily is to work with someone if there’s an infraction . . . It’s like: ‘Let me explain to you the requirements, let me tell you coordination procedures, we’ll get it all taken care of and as long as you work with me diligently to get this resolved then we’re not going to pursue anything other than getting it taken care of, which is what the FCC would prefer us to do.’”

  In her fight to protect the quiet, it turned out that Woody had an even more powerful ally than the FCC: the Department of Defense, which happened to also have a major presence in the Quiet Zone. I’d been hearing rumors about a secretive government facility in the area. Speaking with Woody, I realized that she played a key role in its operations.

  BACK IN THE 1950s, when Green Bank was grabbing headlines for its new astronomy observatory, the U.S. military had been quietly building its own radio antenna of unprecedented size in a nearby mountain hollow. Nicknamed the Big Ear, it was to be twice as big as the biggest telescope ever built, with a dish six hundred feet in diameter and rising sixty-six stories high. The forty-million-pound beast would rest on wheels that rotated 360 degrees, allowing it to point in any direction. It was an engineering feat on the scale of the Brooklyn Bridge, carried out in top secrecy because it had “certain military applications of high priority,” as the New York Times reported in June 1959. Built by the U.S. Navy’s Naval Research Laboratory outside the West Virginia town of Sugar Grove—about thirty miles northeast of Green Bank—the Big Ear was intended to monitor Russian communications and missile launches by intercepting radio signals that bounced off the moon. The $79 million telescope ($700 million in today’s dollars) was projected to require a staff of more than one thousand people.

  The proximity to Green Bank was not coincidental. The National Radio Quiet Zone was established to protect both Green Bank and Sugar Grove, with the thirteen-thousand-square-mile rectangular area balanced over both towns. In fact, the navy had initially wanted to build its Big Ear in Green Bank, but the astronomers snapped up that property first, according to a December 1956 statement from Congressman Harley O. Staggers announcing the Sugar Grove project. “Although the two projects have no direct connection,” Staggers said, “it is felt they will be beneficial to each other because of the nature of the radio and research work.”

  After laying the Big Ear’s tracks and excavating a twenty-thousand-square-foot, two-story underground operations facility with a five-hundred-foot-long tunnel underneath the telescope site, total project estimates ballooned to $200 million ($1.7 billion today). The weight of the scope had also grown to sixty-four million pounds. Amid cost overruns, uncertainty over the structural integrity of the design, and questions about the project’s necessity in light of new satellite technology, U.S. secretary of defense Robert McNamara halted work in 1962. By then, $63 million (more than $500 million in today’s dollars) had been dumped into the woods, with little to show for it but a lot of concrete.

  It was a warning for the astronomers, who had considered building their own six-hundred-foot telescope in Green Bank. “It made us realize it would be ha
rd to build anything that big,” said Ken Kellermann.

  Sugar Grove faced abandonment, raising the alarm of Robert C. Byrd, then in his first term as U.S. senator. To salvage the military site, Byrd lobbied McNamara and President John F. Kennedy to have the navy relocate its worldwide communications system to Sugar Grove from Cheltenham, Maryland, where it was running into trouble with growing electromagnetic interference from surrounding suburbs and industry. Byrd told the Department of Defense that Sugar Grove was “one of the finest sites available in the free world for the reception of radio signals.” The Department of Defense approved the request.

  At a May 1969 ceremony activating the $32.5 million facility in Sugar Grove, Byrd boasted that two one-thousand-foot-diameter fence-like antenna arrays, known as Wullenwebers, would serve as “ears” for naval radio communications, receiving messages from ships at sea and naval installations in the Atlantic and Caribbean. Over the following decades, Sugar Grove built a collection of radio dishes and Byrd obtained tens of millions of dollars to expand the Sugar Grove complex. One major investment project in 1984, called “Timberline II,” consisted of a $7.4 million modernization of the underground operations building so it could house $75 million in “new computer and associated research equipment being purchased from Lockheed Missiles and Space Corporation of California and expected to be operational [in 1989],” according to a memo from Byrd’s office that I found in his official archives at Shepherd University. “The military construction project consists of 11,770 square feet of new space and 50,100 square feet of building alterations for a total of 61,870 square feet.” The underground facility was now bigger than a football field, including end zones.

  Amid the multimillion-dollar investments, secretive activity began taking place. Since the mid-1970s, top officials from the National Security Agency (NSA) had been frequenting Sugar Grove with a new objective: to use the radio antennas to eavesdrop on all communications to and from the United States, according to The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford’s exposé of the NSA. It so happened that sixty miles northwest of Sugar Grove, in the West Virginia town of Etam, the Communications Satellite Corporation had three huge receiving dishes processing “more than half of the commercial, international satellite communications entering and leaving the United States each day,” according to Bamford. Using the antennas at Sugar Grove—codenamed Timberline—the NSA intercepted messages from Etam. In a 2005 article for the New York Times, Bamford called Sugar Grove “the country’s largest eavesdropping bug,” with dishes that “silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour.” The NSA also utilized Sugar Grove as a secure location for vital backup records to originals stored at the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.