This is the second part of a three-part series about the Red Rock radar facility in northcentral Pennsylvania. The first and second parts can be found here and here.
In the last part, I talked about receiving an e-mail from Tom Page, co-founder and historian of The Online Air-Defense Radar Museum about photos of the Red Rock radar facility in northeastern Pennsylvania that I had tried to use innocently without realizing they were copyrighted by the museum. In addition to the information I had been given about the facility from the unnamed photographer from Flickr (see last article also), Page provided me with this link in a follow-up e-mail: http://www.radomes.org/museum/showsite.php?site=Benton+AFS,+PA that provides much more detail than what the Flickr photographer had given me.
I asked Page for permission to use comments from his e-mails for this blog post, to which he said:
Please feel free to quote or to paraphrase any or all of my comments, as long as they are kept in context, and it is emphasized that my (our) purpose is to maintain the history and the memory of these Cold War air-defense radar stations and related bases. Thank you.
While I will not repeat verbatim all the information there (you can go look for yourself), one of the more interesting things I learned about the site was that one of the radars there at Benton plus another one in Manassas, Virginia, “were used in 1962 as part of a missile-detection test.” I also learned that I haven’t been the only one to write an article in a newspaper about the site. In November 2005, Ron Bartizek wrote an extremely informative article in the Times-Leader in Wilkes-Barre, which can be found on the museum site here.
I originally started researching information about the Red Rock radar site, or Benton Air Force Station, as it was called, after writing a couple of silly posts over at my blog, Unfinished Rambler, about conspiracy theories. Specifically the conspiracy theories involved that the military was operating secret missions there. Those posts can be found here and here. When I mentioned this to Page, he told me:
Oh, yes, conspiracy theories. They tend to take on a life of their own. Once they are in motion, they are almost impossible to debunk. Case in point, do a Google search on “Montauk” — that was an Air Force radar station just like Benton AFS. When it closed on 31 Jan 1981, the giant AN/FPS-35 radar was abandoned in place since it was the last one of its kind in the Air Force inventory, and was no longer needed. (F.Y.I., Benton AFS had a radar just like it on that large tower than now sports a radome.) At Montauk, that gave rise to an unimaginable number of conspiracy theories about UFOs, time travel (the so-called “Montauk Project”), secret military operations, and all kinds of other nonsense. The one radar tower at Benton is still in use, by the FAA for air-traffic control purposes. And, since 9/11 2001, all FAA long-range radars including the one at Benton are again shared with the Air Force for air-defense purposes. Until now, I was unaware that there were any UFO conspiracies regarding Benton … but I’m not surprised, either. Thanks for mentioning it.
In a subsequent e-mail, Page elaborated upon the Montauk Project. However, I’ll save that for a post starting next week, based on the information that Page gave me plus other information I’ll find online about it. Needless to say, conspiracy nuts just don’t live in the hills of northcentral Pennsylvania.
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