IGM Cold War close call

Inter-Galactic Memo
To: The known universe
Fr: W. Leavitt
Re: An old and spooky story

I was watching something on the History Channel tonight, about engineering disasters, and they mentioned a few close calls during the cold war, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it jogged a memory.
My father told me this story years ago. It happened circa 1963. This was the one year we actually lived in Las Vegas, even though I was born here. (Until we moved here to teach.) As far as I know it is still highly classified, but dad is gone, so who cares? Dad had been stationed to Thule Air Force Base, in Thule Greenland, well above the Arctic Circle, as chief of security. He was OSI back then. Thule was part of the new Early Warning System being built as a deterrent against a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.
When he arrived, the military was installing a new radar system, state of the art—experimental in fact, that was supposed to increase our warning time by at least ten minutes. I guess someone back then thought ten minutes made a difference. The antenna for this system was a slightly curved rectangular web of steel about the size of a football field, and they had two or three of them. As dad tells it, he was awakened one morning around two AM with the news that they had a double-secret, class-one, gold-star emergency. (Okay, I made that part up). At that point protocol took over and dad arrived at the nerve center of the operation, a beyond-top secret control center for the radar installation. As OSI station chief, he was in charge of locking down the base and making sure no one was leaking information. (who you gonna tell four hundred miles north of the arctic circle, an Eskimo?)
The scientists were testing the new radar, a full-power run-up prior to going on-line, when they began to receive multiple signals coming over the north pole. Needless to say, it put them in a panic. There were dozens of signals. The eggheads told the commander the signatures of the signals were strikingly similar to those of an ICBM. But since they were still calibrating the installation, they could not be sure what was happening. Dad recalled that you could have cut the tension with a knife. People were shouting, running, doing everything they could to interpret the signals. Back then we had between 20 and 30 minutes before the nukes began to hit their targets. Everyone in the room was desperately trying to figure out what was going on, how many missiles? where were they coming from? and how long did they have before it was “too late”.
I can’t imagine what it must have felt like. Dad told me that with about three minutes left before we had to launch our own missiles, some of the engineers figured out the mystery. The new radar system was more powerful than they had calculated, by an exponential factor. What they were seeing on their screen was the moon, rising over the ice of Greenland’s interior. For some reason that I’m sure Mister Sammons would know, the moon was coming in as multiple signals.
They called off the alert, re-calibrated the array, and everyone went to the Officers Club and got wasted. Except dad, because he was Mormon. By the way, at the officers club you could choose ice cubes dating from last week to 100,000 years ago, pulled from core samples in the ice.
If there is a point to this story, which as far as I know has never been made public, it is that we have no idea what is happening out there, on any given day. The world is nothing like what we hope, or believe, or dream it is.