My Strange New Mexico

The Day It Rained Milk

Posted on Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 07:49PM by Mike Smith in Column | Post a Comment | Email | Print

The winds gusted in, and the clouds jostled for room, and the sky grew dark over Silver City.

In this southwestern New Mexico town, calendars that afternoon announced the date as Monday, January 7, 2008, though the majority of the town’s more than 10,000 residents were not inside taking note. Instead, they were at their windows, or on their porches, or carefully venturing outdoors, wondering what exactly was happening with the weather and why it appeared to be raining milk.

The air hung cold, and when the clouds began to empty, their rain fell white and opaque, spattering down in gobs and torrents. The pale rain cascaded like watery paste down cars and roofs and windows, and pooled on the ground in strange, glue-colored puddles. For more than two hours, the streets ran white with what looked like milk, and the albino downpour drenched Silver City, as part of an unusual storm that, over the course of a few hours, painted an estimated 200 square miles of the desert white.

The storm poured its whiteness over towns as far west as Duncan, Arizona, and Virden, New Mexico in Hidalgo County; as far east as Santa Clara and San Lorenzo in Grant County; and as far north as Glenwood and Alma in Catron County—causing numerous alarmed locals to call the New Mexico Environment Department, and spurring many others to collect samples for testing.

“It was so unexpected and so unnatural, it made you wonder what new environmental horror we had unleashed,” said Alice Jones, a faculty member of Western New Mexico University (WNMU) in Silver City. “When I stepped outside into the rain, the puddles in the street were as white as milk. ...I at first thought there must have been a volcanic eruption somewhere and this was the ash washing out of the atmosphere. It was a cold day and a lot of people in Silver City heat with wood. A friend speculated it was all the wood smoke. Someone else said it was from a fire in Mexico or Arizona.”

Spooked locals also suggested such causes as clouds of dust and pollution drifting over from China, pollution from Albuquerque or Las Cruces, fires in California, and toxic dust from tailings piles at the Tyrone Mine—an already controversial copper mining operation just south of Silver City. Residents remained suspicious of volcanoes, but they failed to agree on which one could have been the cause. Was it, for instance, the Llaima Volcano down in Chile, which melted snow into floodwater and forced the evacuation of 700 people on January 3 and 4? Or the Shiveluch Volcano, on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, which exploded on December 20, 2007?

The story soon poured onto the Internet, whiting out logic and rationality as it went.

Various websites connected the event to ghosts and ghostly ectoplasm, to UFOs reported over central Texas the following day, to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and to the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a.k.a. HAARP—an Alaska research facility dedicated to the study of the earth’s upper atmosphere, a facility accused by some of affecting the weather. (HAARP, despite being based in Alaska, has also been blamed for causing the Taos Hum.)

Another website implied the rain was loaded with “smartdust”—theorized collectives of semi-mobile microscopic surveillance equipment disguised as dust motes—while others suggested it had something to do with “chemtrails,” the notion that airplanes emit smoky lines of highly toxic poisons in place of normal exhaust as part of a purposeful attempt by the U.S. government to change the earth’s climate and kill off humanity.

“AS THE CHEMTRAILS IN SOME AREAS LEAVES WEBS, MAYBE THEY ARE MORE WATERED DOWN TO MAKE A MILKY SUBSTANCE,” read an online comment posted January 20, 2008 by one of the theory’s most literate proponents. “DAM KILLER PLANES.”

Meanwhile, in the day’s early evening, after the last white drops of the storm crashed against the ground, residents of Silver City and the surrounding area began to assess the bizarre event’s effects, and to try to find some real answers. When the rain dried, it left a white residue described by the January 11, 2008 Las Cruces Sun-News as “almost sticky,” a residue often difficult to remove. Russell Dobkins—a resident of Gila, a small town thirty miles northwest of Silver City—initially thought it seemed to “be eating into the paint of [his] car.”

Every area window appeared coated in the white substance, and line after line of chalky-looking cars rolled along into area carwashes. Understandably worried that the weird storm was the result of dangerous pollution, Dobkins, an organic farmer and biologist, took the matter seriously, contacting state and regional media, working with environmental groups such as the Gila Resource Information Project (GRIP), putting up fliers requesting information, helping send samples of the rain to labs—in El Paso, Texas, in Socorro, and in Albuquerque—and alerting the Gila Regional Hospital to be on the lookout for Valley Fever, a.k.a. coccidioidomycosis, a potentially lethal fungal virus that sometimes accompanies airborne sediment.

“We didn’t know what [the rain] was—if it had come from the mines or what,” Dobkins said. “But what’s cool is we were able to mobilize and deal with it locally, to do the work, and to tell the media, ‘It could be serious, and if it’s a problem, you need to be involved.’”

No plant or animal life appeared harmed by the storm, but a number of area locals soon reportedly complained of flu-like symptoms which they attributed to the dust. And when, about two weeks later, a days-long rainstorm washed much of the suspect powder from the area’s streets down into the Gila River, into water that many locals needed to irrigate their farms and gardens, many people felt concerned.

Most of their worries began to fade though, as test results came back from the labs.

The residue from the rain evidently wasn’t from a volcano, in part because its particles, when examined under a microscope, appeared round and solid like windblown sand, not rough and sharp like volcanic ash. It didn’t seem to be from the Tyrone Mine, because the chemical compositions didn’t quite match up, and because the storm had moved in a northeasterly direction, falling on the town of White Signal before it had reached the mine. And it probably wasn’t from HAARP or from smartdust or from chemtrails, because of...well...Occam’s Razor.

What the evidence did show, however, was that the bizarre white rainfall was likely the result of an enormous dust storm on a dry, salty lakebed (or playa) reported about 120 miles southwest of Silver City, near Willcox, Arizona. There, dust had been swept by high winds into the clouds, mixed with a storm system, moved northeast, and rained down as a watery, white mud. The findings of the various labs and of at least one independent Silver City investigator all seemed to suggest this conclusion is the most likely.

“NMED staff compared metal results from historic data collected in the early 1990s by NMED’s Surface Water Bureau from playa lakes near Lordsburg to the milky rain event and found similar chemical signatures of metals,” wrote NMED’s Jerry Schoeppner, in a recent e-mail. “That comparison strengthened the suspicion that strong winds may have suspended sediment from playa basins that could have mixed with precipitation and created the milky rain. However, regardless of the source, the metals measured from the samples were in a form and concentration that posed a minimal risk to the public.”

Russell Dobkins, and Allyson Siwik of GRIP, served as the impetus and the driving force of the investigation, contacting everyone who might know something or be able to help spread the word. Phil Harrigan, a geoscientist in the Silver City Field Office, helped coordinate efforts to collect and examine samples of the rainwater. Scientists Joel Gilbert and Thomas Gill of the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), along with Bonnie Frey of New Mexico Tech (NMT) in Socorro, and others, all ran analyses of the mysterious residue. And satellite photos obtained from NASA and interpreted by Thomas Gill and New Mexico State University professor Max Bleiweiss even show a plume of dust blowing from the playa northeast toward New Mexico on the morning of the storm.

(Other individuals and organizations helped as well, in many other capacities, and by the time the investigation eventually wound down, toward the end of January, the investigators’ many exchanged e-mails, from which much of the information in this column originated, could have been bound into a small book.)

Accounts also surfaced of similar happenings having occurred elsewhere—such as in Ruidoso, New Mexico, in Idaho, and in South Africa—the causes of which apparently involved dust as well—and the mystery of the white rain, although not definitively solved, seemed at least to have found a likely explanation.

...It found an explanation, but it didn’t lose its strangeness.

Science has taught us that the sun is not a supernatural deity that sinks into the ocean every night, as certain ancient peoples once believed, and today we know the sun is a fiery nuclear dynamo converting hydrogen into helium at unfathomable temperatures on an unfathomable scale—but that doesn’t make its existence any less amazing or any less freaky.

In that same way, we know that the white rain that fell on and around Silver City likely had nothing to do with 1984-influenced nanotechnology or with covertly genocidal airlines, but the event isn’t really any less unusual because of it. A violent dust storm still threw a salt flat into the air. Clouds engorged with white dust still raced from Arizona to New Mexico. And on a day this last January, the streets of Silver City still appeared to be flooded with milk—and the people who saw it happen it still had no idea why or what it was.

The experience remains memorable, and it remains strange.

Underground Music

Posted on Saturday, June 14, 2008 at 03:28PM by Mike Smith in Article | 1 Comment | Email | Print

A portrait of darkness framed in railroad ties, the entrance to the San Pedro Mine hangs against the stony desert swells of a gray-brown rise of mountains, about thirty miles northeast of Albuquerque.  For more than a century, sounds have carried up from deep within the mine—sounds of picks and clattering rock, of metal wheels on steel tracks, miners’ voices, black-powder blasts and, in 1940, the classical strains of a symphony orchestra.

The San Pedro Mountains in which the old mine is located may have been worked as far back as the early-1600s, and most certainly were by 1713, the year a Spanish captain registered a mine there.  In 1828, gold was discovered in the nearby Ortiz Mountains, and in 1832, it was found in the San Pedros—sparking the first major gold rush west of the Mississippi, predating California’s by two decades.  A mining camp, San Pedro, sprang up to the west, and another strike in 1839 brought additional miners—first for placer mining—sifting through rocks and sand in streams and arroyos—and then for tunneling.  It may have been around that time that the San Pedro Mine itself was first developed, but recorded ownership of the mine didn’t start until 1880.  The mine passed from one owner to another, experienced alternating periods of lucrative activity and frustrating silence, turned out sporadic but notable amounts of copper as well as silver and gold, and in 1938 was bought by Raskob Mining Interests, Inc., of New York.

John Jakob Raskob, the company’s millionaire owner, served as a Vice President for both General Motors and DuPont, yet is primarily remembered as the man who built the Empire State Building.  Raskob seemed to attract attention with nearly everything he did—speaking out against Prohibition and the New Deal, publishing an article entitled “Everybody Ought to Be Rich” on the eve of the Great Depression, and, of course, competing against car magnate Walter Chrysler in a race to build the world’s tallest building.  (Less well-known but even more amazing was what Raskob did in 1933, when he and several other wealthy businessmen organized a secret and ultimately unsuccessful military coup with the aim of forcing President Franklin D. Roosevelt—and his ideas about the redistribution of wealth—out of office, before installing a fascist dictator in his place.  That conspiracy was well-documented in Jules Archer’s 1973 book, The Plot to Seize the White House.)  

After Raskob bought the San Pedro Mine in 1938, he appointed his son, Robert “R. P.” Raskob, to help oversee the mine’s reopening.  Robert Raskob and his wife Dolores were patrons and board members of the Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra, later renamed the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, and sometime before May of 1940, the junior Raskob approached the orchestra’s conductor, Grace Thompson, about a unique idea he had for the reopening of the mine—a symphonic concert, performed half-a-mile underground.

This would be no ordinary concert, and Grace Thompson was no ordinary conductor.  Born in 1890, raised in Ohio, and diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1918, Thompson headed west, to Albuquerque, hoping the warm desert climate would help dry the disease from her lungs.  Upon arriving in Albuquerque, she required an ambulance to take her from the train station to a sanitarium, but by 1925 she had recovered enough to head the music department at the University of New Mexico.  In 1932, she became the first woman in American history—and perhaps in the world—to found and direct a symphony orchestra—the Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra—a more-than-sixty-member, all-volunteer group of UNM students and recovering TB patients. 

Thompson agreed to Raskob’s unusual request, announcements were sent out to the press, and invitations were mailed out to prominent politicians, writers, and businessmen, urging everyone to attend “dressed either as miners, in a Spanish costume, or anything that suits your fancy.”  Thompson and a small entourage made a trip out to the mine to examine where the show would take place—an enormous underground room or “stope,” with ceilings thirty-three feet high—and to determine how best to set up a full orchestra inside a working mine.  Miners strung lights down into the chamber, and leveled off the great room’s floor.

The day of the show, Sunday, May 19, 1940, was a day to remember at the old San Pedro Mine.  An all-day fiesta, with food and entertainment, buzzed around the mine entrance, celebrating the mine’s reopening, the mine’s supposed 100th anniversary, and the so-called Coronado Cuarto Centennial Celebration—the much-hyped 400th anniversary of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s entry into New Mexico.  Guests arrived from Albuquerque, and all were greeted by headlamp-wearing miners who accompanied them on a 1,500-foot ride in ore dump carts down into the ground.  At the end of the tracks, the guests were led another several hundred feet, ultimately arriving in the enormous high-ceilinged chamber, an accidental auditorium big enough for 300 people.

The orchestra sat on an elevated rock platform about fifteen feet above the rest of the chamber, illuminated by massive floodlights, and at 3:30 p.m., Grace Thompson stood behind a podium said to have been made of heaped gold-bearing ore, and raised her baton.  She wore a blue velvet dress, reminiscent of 16th century Spain, while the rest of the orchestra played dressed as old-time Spanish peasants.  The concert season had just ended five days before, so for the musicians, the event was a party.

The May 20, 1940 Albuquerque Journal called the performance “An eerie scene that might have been a fantastic episode from the pen of Jules Verne,” and the Albuquerque Tribune that same day remarked, “Whether the strains disturbed the shades of ancient Indian and Spanish miners, none could say.” 

More than 600 people attended the event, though not all at one time, due to limited space.  Seated on rocky outcroppings, empty dynamite boxes, and a few chairs, the concertgoers included the more than 100 miners employed by Raskob’s San Pedro Mining Company, most of them from the nearby pueblos of Santo Domingo and San Felipe.  Also in attendance were area locals, politicians and patrons from Albuquerque, businessmen from the East Coast, a group of Catholic catechists from the San Pedro Mission, and John Jakob Raskob himself, who noted to the press his enjoyment of “the acoustical perfection of the music.” 

In the tall darkness beyond the rocky stage, the miners’ headlamps bobbed like luminous insects, moving in time to the music of the orchestra, guitarist Eduardo Sandoval, and Native American dancers.  When the concert ended after two hours, the audience demanded more, applauding wildly in the subterranean darkness.

New Mexico, it often seems, is a place of abundant culture and inimitable quirkiness, a home to both the artistic and the otherworldly, the refined and the remarkable.  Here, we have the Taos Society of Artists and the Taos Hum, the Santa Fe Institute and the Roswell Incident and—symbolic of both—we have a symphony orchestra, performing live, underground, in a mineshaft.

***

This article first appeared in the May 2008 issue of New Mexico Magazine, accompanied by original artwork by Darlene McElroy.  If you don't already subscribe, you should!  And be sure to let them know "My Strange New Mexico" sent you.

The Crystal Skull

Posted on Saturday, May 31, 2008 at 02:25PM by Mike Smith in Column | 4 Comments | Email | Print

With the recent premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, residents of the San Luis Valley in north central New Mexico and southern Colorado may find themselves recalling the actual “crystal skull” that once made an appearance in their area.

 

The San Luis Valley stretches from Colorado south into New Mexico, and from the San Juan Mountains at the valley’s western edge, to the Sangre de Cristo range at its east. The valley is an approximately 150-mile-long by 45-mile-wide alpine basin, and over the years has become notorious for its residents’ abundant reports of Bigfoot, UFOs, green fireballs, and demonic figures. From 1975 through 1978, the area attracted international attention for its large number of unusual livestock deaths, and many eyes turned to it in 1995, when a bizarre, translucent skull turned up on a San Luis Valley ranch.

Discovered outdoors in February of 1995 by an eagle-eyed ranch hand in Moffat, Colorado, the skull was immediately offered to Donna Koch, the ranch’s owner, who doubled back on her ATV to see what it was. What it was was a grimacing glass skull, weighing three pounds, measuring six-and-a-half inches high, and looking asymmetrical and elongated—almost, Koch thought, like the skull of an “ant person.”

It was not the first such crystalline skull to be found on the planet—in fact, there had been at least a dozen similar skulls before it, enough to carve out a wild little niche of New Age subculture, a group composed of people who believe these skulls emanate psychic radiation, are of ancient Central American origin, and can sometimes be used as macabre crystal balls, to foresee the future. No test performed on any of these skulls—including on the famous Mitchell-Hedges skull, said to have been discovered in 1926—has ever shown any of these skulls to date further back than the 1870s or to be anything more than recently manmade artifacts—and yet the movement built around them is undeniable, with many skulls held as objects of veneration and believed to be ancient, and many others used as tools for meditation although accepted as modern. Among those who believe in these skulls’ powers, word soon spread about Koch’s San Luis Valley find—down the valley, and into the world.

One psychic, according to Christopher O’Brien’s 1996 The Mysterious Valley, warned Koch that, “It is very old. It’s not man-made and not of this earth. You must be very careful with it. It can be very detrimental.... You must be balanced, or you will be hurt.”

Another psychic prediction advised her not to sleep by it, and urged her to store the artifact wrapped in silk, in a cedar box. Many people who saw the skull claimed to sense a distinct energy emanating from it, and others felt frightened enough by it to avoid Koch’s property altogether. Koch and her circle of family and friends began noticing odd occurrences around their ranch, claiming that whenever anyone besides Donna tried to take the skull from the property, someone would get hurt; for instance, her son got hit in the head by a hammer, just one day after he volunteered to take the skull to an art appraiser, and her husband got hit by a truck boom. A female friend carried the skull past a truck at the exact moment that truck’s spare tire exploded, and one video camera wouldn’t work when someone tried to film it. Koch also claimed that the skull always remained clean and could not be gotten dirty, and her husband talked of a time when he pulled the skull from out of a cabinet and smelled the overwhelming scent of perfume, a smell he said he had not smelled before or since.

Later that year, more than one hundred people arrived to gather around the skull beneath a full moon, at Colorado’s White Eagle Village Inn, Retreat, and Conference Center, coming from as far away as Minnesota, meditating around the skull for hours, and then recording their impressions.

Joshua Shapiro, co-author of Mysteries of the Crystal Skulls Revealed, wrote in a 1996 online article that “As far as what sensitives have picked up about the skull, some people felt the skull was very young or newly created. Other people felt that it was a projection of some spiritual entity into our world which might explain why its form is so strange...others felt that the shape was solidified from some type of liquid and then others felt the skull had a connection with the Inner Earth.”

One paranormal investigator—mentioned in Christopher O’Brien’s 1999 follow-up, Enter the Valley—spent eight entire days sitting with the object, attempting to channel the spirits of those he believed had shaped it, and claiming to receive messages from it regarding a (mythical) sunken continent known as Lemuria. The investigator spoke of other skulls waiting to be found, ancient settlers, and explorers; others claimed it was made by aliens. A collector of the paranormal offered to buy the celebrated skull for $20,000, and the Rocky Mountain News wrote about the skull and its surrounding phenomena in a November 10, 1996 article.

That article caught the attention of a Mr. and Mrs. Chadez, the absentee owners of the property next to the Kochs’. Their son—Brad Chadez, a young glass blower from Denver’s Blake Street Glass Company—had previously created a batch of glass skulls to sell at a Day of the Dead festival down in Santa Fe, and when one skull had turned out too misshapen to sell, he had given it to his parents to mark the corner of their property with—and to use as “a talisman,” whatever that means. The Chadez family released the truth to the local media, and the psychic channeling of the skull’s ancient spirits rattled to an abrupt and sheepish halt.

Informed of this, Christopher O’Brien wrote in his 1999 Enter the Valley that, “As with most true ‘mysteries,’ there are usually no easy answers. The innocent little ‘ant person skull’ has had quite an effect on people. The reported strange phenomena that seemed to surround the skull still have no obvious explanations.”

But really, they do. They have really obvious explanations.

*** 

Be sure to check out the latest installments of "My Strange New Mexico: Roswell Edition."  John LeMay's two-part series on the alleged Aztec UFO landing should be sure to generate controversy and conversation. 

And, let us know what you think of the "Daily Strange."  Is it worth maintaining as a feature of the site?

Be Good or Else

Posted on Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 10:54PM by Mike Smith in Column | 12 Comments | Email | Print

Most New Mexicans have heard the story of La Llorona—“the weeping woman,” the ditch witch, the mysterious ghost who’s said to wander this state’s arroyos crying for the children she once purposefully drowned. Many people believe she really exists, most probably don’t, but nearly all are in agreement that telling stories of her seems to be a fairly effective method for scaring young children out of playing in ditches.

Another, although lesser-known, New Mexico figure of this sort is El Abuelo—“the grandfather,” the bogeyman. Known with variations as El Agüelo, El Cuco, El Coco, El Cucuye, and so forth, the idea of El Abuelo undoubtedly originated as part of the traditional, masked Matachines dances performed annually in so many rural New Mexico villages and pueblos—dances incorporating Native American dance steps and European costumes, music, and history. At these events, the aggressive but clownish figure of the dancing Abuelo can seem especially frightening to young children, with a power that seems to extend far beyond the dance; he appears, as folklorist Thomas J. Steele wrote in 2001, to somehow have “a life outside the theater.”

This frightening extra dimension may be thanks in part to such ominous sayings as “Si no te sosiegas, llamo el Abuelo”—“If you don’t behave, I’ll call in the grandfather.” And more than one traditional lullaby, such as the following included in Rafaela G. Castro’s Chicano Folklore: A Guide to the Folktales, Traditions, Rituals and Religious Practices of Mexican-Americans, tells of this bogeyman as well...

A la ruru, mi hijito,
Duérmase ya,
Que viene el coco
Y se lo comera!

(Lullaby, my little son,
Sleep now,
For the bogeyman might come,
To eat you up!)

In northern New Mexico, the image of El Abuelo—striding across the ground cracking a whip, yelling about various children’s behavior, his face unseen behind a mask or slathered-on makeup—has long been used to frighten children into obeying parents or going to bed on time. In some tales, under some names, accounts of him seem to blur with stories of giants, and with stories of Bigfoot. Today, as El Kookooee, this traditionally feared and revered bogeyman meets a fiery death every October, when residents of Albuquerque’s South Valley construct a twenty-foot-tall wooden effigy of the figure, and then burn it to the ground.

The October 24, 2007 Albuquerque Tribune recounted the words of local artist Tom Powell that, in 2006, “as El Kookooee was in flames, the image of [his] face came out from the smoke and started to glow”—as if the old bogeyman was trying to say that the people might burn him, but he would be back.

And the following October, he was.

Then there are los duendes—“the dwarfs.” In an article in the July-September 1910 issue of the Journal of American Folklore, Alexander F. Chamberlain described los duendes as “Elves and fairies, little infant-faced angels, who cannot reach either heaven or hell, but must inhabit the air. They are said to be either male or female, some black, etc. Again, they are said to be just like gnomes.”

Author Stephen Ausherman recently resurrected the notion of los duendes in his terrific new guidebook, 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Albuquerque, in which he credited los duendes for certain anonymous acts of trail maintenance in the desert east of Albuquerque.

Ausherman wrote:

I had driven along [the Golden Open Space’s] barbed-wire fences perhaps a half dozen times in as many years, assuming it was private ranchland. But then small Open Space signs mysteriously appeared on the posts of its padlocked gates. Later, pink and orange survey flags sprouted from the gritty earth, forming a dotted line that wended through juniper savanna. Unable to locate anyone willing to take credit for the trail work, I reached the only logical conclusion: the land was beset with los duendes.

Some people describe them as industrious elves, others as evil dwarfs. In his 1910 paper, “New-Mexican Spanish Folk-Lore,” Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa identified los duendes as “individuals of small stature who frighten the lazy, the wicked and in particular the filthy.” Their origins and motives remain a mystery.

Espinosa’s paper, which Ausherman cited, also tells of a Santa Fe woman who claimed to know almost for a fact that los duendes live communally underground in houses built inside of caverns, venturing out only at night to steal food and clothing or to go shopping.

And in support of the view of los duendes as helpful elves, Espinosa wrote:

The following story is one well known: A family once moved from one place to another, and, on arriving at the new house, the mother was looking for the broom to sweep. Her daughter, a lazy and careless girl, had forgotten it in the old home. Presently a dwarf appeared, descending slowly from the roof with the broom in his hand, and, presenting it to the lady, he said, "Here it is!"

(If any reader of "My Strange New Mexico" knows a word meaning something along the lines of “creepy, yet hilarious,” consider e-mailing it to mike@mystrangenewmexico.com. This column may have a use for it.)

If the idea of El Abuelo helps get one’s kids to sleep, and the idea of los duendes helps keep them clean and hardworking, then the idea of el basilisco—“the basilisk”—may be ideal to keep them crying softlyin their rooms, with their doors locked, feeling too paralyzed by fear and anxiety to do much of anything.

El basilisco, in most New Mexican accounts, is born as the result of a hen impregnated by an aged rooster; in some accounts it resembles a one-eyed feathered worm, in others, an almost shapeless black mass, or a cross between a snake and a chicken; in almost all of them, it takes only a single glance from its lonely eye for it to kill you. Legendary New Mexico historian Marc Simmons wrote about el basilisco in Witchcraft in the Southwest: Spanish and Indian Supernaturalism on the Rio Grande, recording that its “roots revert back to a fabled reptile of the African desert with a breath and look said to be fatal.”

In a recent personal interview with “My Strange New Mexico,” Tom Romero—a former resident of the town of Chico, in northeastern New Mexico’s Colfax County—recalled being told as a child that, once a basilisco hatches, “It gets out, burrows down, then peeks out of the ground, and anything it sees dies. ...In the northeast part of New Mexico and southern Colorado, people still talk of it. There’s no La Llorona away from the river, so that’s how they keep the kids home on the prairies.”

Romero recalled that whenever a farm’s lamb would die without an easy explanation, the basilisco would be blamed, and he recalled hearing that the only way to kill these wormy creatures was to show them their own reflections. He remembered hearing that some kids, before beginning to play a game of baseball or something called “Fox and the Geese,” would walk around through the fields first, holding mirrors at an angle, so that the creatures would see their own selves and wither away, instead of seeing the children and inadvertently murdering them all.

All of these entities—from the ghostly La Llorona, to the ever-evolving Abuelo, to the mischievous duendes and the deadly basiliscos—still receive a degree of belief from a number of New Mexicans, usually from those who grew up being told of them—and no doubt their believers’ worldviews are all the stranger and more interesting for it. The rest of us, however, can still enjoy a certain strangeness as well—that of a world in which people choose to terrify their children with the fear of ghosts and evil dwarfs instead of, say, teaching them to stay out of ditches so as not to be killed in a flash flood, or to work hard simply because there’s work that needs doing.

***

Be sure to check out the newest feature of Mystrangenewmexico.com—“The Daily Strange’’!

Updated once every weekday at Mystrangenewmexico.com/daily, “The Daily Strange” features a short posting about one of New Mexico’s strangest current events—from the woman who thought she saw her boyfriend in a pornographic film—to a recent attack with a barbecue fork. 

Bat Bombs!

Posted on Thursday, April 3, 2008 at 11:40PM by Mike Smith in Column | 10 Comments | Email | Print

The plan involved bats. Millions of bats. Exploding.

In particular, the plan involved the Mexican free-tailed bat—a medium-sized species chosen for its ability to fly while carrying more than twice its weight—and chosen for its vast, millions-sized colonies, which even today form the largest gatherings of mammals on the planet.

In the plan, members of a top-secret World War II-era unit of the U.S. Air Force would net literally millions of Mexican free-tailed bats, from Texas or New Mexico caves, before gluing a tiny, specially-made napalm time-bomb onto every individual one. More than a thousand such armed bats would then be hung beneath stacked trays, inside a hollow, five-foot-tall bombshell perforated with air holes and equipped with a parachute. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these bombs would then be loaded into planes. The bombs’ temperatures would be lowered enough to send the bats into temporary hibernation—to eliminate the need to feed and calm them—and the “bat bombs” would then be flown, via the Micronesian island of Tinian, into the early-morning darkness over Japan.

The bombs would then fall through the air until, triggered by an altimeter about 4,000 feet up, their parachutes would bloom, their sheet-metal sides would fall away, the pins of the time bombs would pull out, and the bats themselves would awaken and emerge. The moonlit sky would fill with leathery wings, and the bats would fly down to roost before dawn, down to the eaves and overhangs of the city of Osaka. Fanning out for an estimated twenty miles in every direction, the bomb-bearing bats would roost all over the overcrowded city, before settling into the nooks of the city’s picturesque but notoriously combustible wooden buildings—shifting into sleep, and then exploding—bursting into flame, and burning down the city, a city that at the time boasted a population of approximately seven million people.

The idea for these bizarre “bat bombs” came to be known as Project X-Ray, but was initially known as the Adams Plan. Dr. Lytle S. Adams, a Pennsylvania inventor and dental surgeon, thought of the idea in December of 1941, shortly after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

In the April 1948 Bulletin of the National Speleological Society, Adams recollected, “I had just been to Carlsbad Caverns, [in southeastern New Mexico], and had been tremendously impressed by the bat flight…. Couldn't those millions of bats be fitted with incendiary bombs and dropped from planes? What could be more devastating than such a firebomb attack?"

By January of 1942, Adams had gotten a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Roosevelt had responded with a brief note to a top military official, writing in part, “This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into.”

Thus encouraged to make the idea a reality, teams of bat experts and chemists were assembled, to determine such things as how much a bat could carry and what kind of explosives should be used. Bats were netted from Carlsbad Caverns—caves wrongly believed at the time to contain the largest population of bats in the country, an estimated 8.7 million—and successful tests using unarmed bombs were conducted just outside of the caverns’ namesake, the town of Carlsbad.

During one particular test in early July of 1943, six bats were armed with bombs and released for a photo-op. The bats proved livelier than expected, however, and quickly flew to the buildings of a brand-new auxiliary air field of the Carlsbad Air Force Base. They roosted on a barracks building, on a control tower, on an office, on an airplane hangar—and, according to some accounts, on a general’s car and a fuel tank. Then, they blew up. The fires they caused sparked other fires, black smoke rose into the sky, and the entire complex burnt to the ground.

“After that test, [the project] did go in a different direction,” said Jack Couffer, Project X-Ray’s youngest member, in a recent personal interview. “That test was carried out by the Air Force. We were all in the Air Force. When that mishap happened, they took it more seriously than they probably should have. That was kind of the final straw.”

Infighting among the project members followed, as did the ouster of the project’s founder, a takeover of the project by the Marines, additional tests in Utah and California and Texas, the construction and bat-induced immolation of a fake Japanese village in Utah, the ordering of a million bomb-equipped bats for an actual planned attack, and finally, the sudden and insufficiently explained shutdown of the project—which coincided, interestingly enough, with various successes in New Mexico’s other top-secret project—a little something being worked on a bit farther north, in Los Alamos.

The year before, 1942, word of that project had drifted down to the men of Project X-Ray. The wonderfully eccentric 1992 book Bat Bomb: World War II’s Other Secret Weapon, by Jack Couffer, recounts a conversation about the two projects, and is well worth quoting from at length.

“I heard the damnedest thing while I was in D.C.,” Doc [Adams] said when he got back from Washington. “Some general I met regarding appropriations confused our secret project with another secret project that’s apparently going on somewhere. It’s the silliest nonsense you ever heard of. And evidently this project has got the backing of the president and they’re blowing millions of dollars on it.”

[Jack] Von Bloeker [a bat authority and the project’s physiologist] looked up through his smoke and frowned.

“This general practically threw me out of his office, he was so enraged at the waste of time and money. ‘Don’t tell me you’re the one promoting that crazy notion of making bombs out of atoms?’”

“I had a hell of a time convincing him I had nothing to do with that kind of fraud,” Doc continued.

“What are atoms?” [project member] Frank Benish asked.

“The smallest particles of matter. You know, everything’s made out of cells. You break down cells and you’ve got something even smaller—atoms—something like that.”

“And they think they can make bombs out of them?” Benish shook his head. “Man, they don’t know sic ‘em from come here.”

“Can you imagine such an idea?” Doc said. “They’re throwing away millions, and I can’t get a staff car and driver!”

“Where’s all this happening?” [Von Bloeker] asked.

Doc shrugged. “As soon as he found out I had nothing to do with it he clammed up. But he first got the idea I was involved when I said we had some work to do in New Mexico.”

“Unbelievable!” [Von Bloeker] said.

“Yeah! We got a sure thing like the bat bomb going, something that could really win the war, and they’re jerking off with tiny little atoms. It makes me want to cry.”

New Mexico’s other top secret project—the atomic bomb, for you slower kids—ended World War II in August of 1945, with the dropping of two such bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It ended the war, and in mere minutes it also ended more than 220,000 human lives, with thousands more to come due to the bombs’ radiation.

Had bat bombs been used instead, with the bats burning down nearly everything within forty square miles, such an attack would have incinerated almost ten times the area that was burned when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Radiation poisoning would not have been an issue, and though the effects on the American Southwest’s bat populations would have been inestimable, it’s fairly certain that fewer people would have died, as theoretically they could have dived into any of the numerous canals that criss-crossed the city of Osaka, and avoided burning to death.

“I can say that I think it would have worked,” said Jack Couffer. “We were really on the verge of making it happen.”

***

Be sure to pick up a copy of the terrific new hiking guidebook, 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Albuquerque, by Stephen Ausherman, which gives a gracious endorsement of Mystrangenewmexico.com in its tour of virtual New Mexico. Fans of the state's strangest and quirkiest will find something wonderful on every page; the entire book serves as a transformative reintroduction to the wonders of central New Mexico. Don't wait! Pick one up today.