Re: Haystack Butte, Edwards AFB


Message posted by gary on March 24, 2001 at 21:42:30 PST:

The haystack site has had many uses over it's lifetime. It was and may still be a precision targetting range for avionics. I doubt they ever dropped bombs there, given the proximity to the highway, but they could fly the site and check the ability of the hardware to spot the targets on the ground.

Move the terraserver around the site and you can see a few targets.

One thing for sure we can agree on is your observation that they didn't crash together.

Edwards AFB has an on-site historian. If enough people inquire to the public affairs officer, they might give us the details. When I asked Edwards AFB about the Haystack site and those planes in particular, the historian eventually got back to me that the activities around the haystack area were not well documented. [Not a big secret either, just nobody really knew much about that part of the base.] He checked my web site, then went out to the site himself to check it out, but nobody he could find knew exactly what those planes were doing there.

California City, a few miles north of the Edwards, did have bombs dropped on ranges nearby. Occasionally you read about a shell being found there. My attempts via phone to get information out of California City officials about the location of the bombing range have been something like "Yeah there was a range here but I don't know where it is".


In Reply to: Re: Haystack Butte, Edwards AFB posted by Rocketfox on March 24, 2001 at 18:27:07 PST:

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