This is a great read. If I were closer to the area I'd definitely have spent some time trying to recreate the investigation and check out the site.

Also, got to plug the story of the search for the lost German tourists in Death Valley[1]. I feel like his writing in that series really gets you in the head of the lost, and is morbidly fascinating.

[1] http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hun...

Reading that one now.[1] Fascinating and terrifying. (Especially having spent just enough time in that part of the country to have some context.)

[1] While looking at each of the spots he references on Google Earth along the way. An incredibly barren and foreboding area.

> For a while prior to this, I had been poking into the field of remote viewing, which hadn’t yet quite burst into the public’s perception ... I had contact with a couple of remote viewers and thought this might be a useful test of this rather strange skill. The data back seemed to indicate a spot not southeast of Leith, but southwest.

Wait - what?

This threw me off because my impression of the author was somebody who was very technical and critical.

Great read - nonetheless.

He also seems to have at least a basic interest in hunting for UFOs, even if he's rational enough to expect that most of the reports are probably false. But he seems basically open to the idea, if only to recognize the incredible difficulty of being successful. And, as he notes, the remote viewing wasn't accurate or useful.

You should not confuse people who are technically capable as being unable to believe something that isn't definitively proven.

I liked the background of remote viewing, UFOs, etc. I was a nice reminder of a very particular slice of 90s popular culture.

The CIA funded remote viewing at Stanford for 20 years: http://www.irva.org/library/pdfs/puthoff2001cia.pdf

Funny to see something like this here. I went with my dad on some airplane wreck hunts when I was younger, though none quite as epic as this one. You'd really be surprised how complete some of these plane wrecks are if they are hard to get to. One I recall was a F-104 thunderchief. It was just amazing to me that they didn't try to remove any of this stuff: https://imgur.com/a/5uToG

A old friend of mine and I visited a corn field in Nebraska ten years ago in search of some wreckage left behind from a crash in 1966. With the help of a metal detector we located metal identification plates, various small pieces of metal, and an ash tray (smoking on planes was once a thing). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braniff_Flight_250

http://wikimapia.org/26461282/Walter-Ray-Lockheed-A-12-Oxcar... covers this plane's crash site and some pictures here: http://www.dreamlandresort.com/info/crash_a-12.html

Thanks for the Dreamland Resort link... I wonder what they're working on at the secret bases today.

One of my passengers worked at the secret bases, in the 1960's. "There's way more stuff underground at Area 12, than at Area 51." [1]

[1] http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/01/imaginary-workplaces.html

Reading this reminded me of one interceptor variant that was canceled. Same specs as the A-12, but armed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12 ). The second seat was added to operate the fire control system (radar/weapons).

Very cool read though.

Interesting, but there's an awful lot of UFO and remote viewing mentions in there.