Green Farm Facility
“Green Farm” (Author Moss Gropen. Published April 2, 2008)
“Green Farm” sounds like the name of a preschool book — a story about a place where contented cows graze in verdant hills, all under the gentle stewardship of a kind farmer.
Well, at one time, there was a “Green Farm” just down the road from General Dynamics’ Sycamore sites and across the way from Miramar NAS. Apparently, there was a Farmer Green and a herd of dairy cows, and even if the pastures weren’t lush, by all accounts, Farmer Green’s bovine charges were content, indeed. But by the late 1950s, the farm had fallen into the hands of government contractors, folks whose tastes ran more to guns than butter.
For the curious who traipsed about the “farm” a few years after its clandestine operations had ceased, there didn’t seem to be much “high-tech” about the place; little of the bucolic, overgrown ambience spoke to what had been tested there and, moreover, what might have been, with unlimited funding. Yet, of all the goings-on, all the projects in East Elliott, the ones at Green Farm were the most futuristic, the most “cutting edge.”
Bizarre Projects
The Electromagnetic Gun was anything but another newfangled rifle. Although the military had continually looked for ways to fire more bullets faster, farther, and with more accuracy, the electromagnetic gun — or “rail gun” — was a radically different approach to shooting projectiles. Manufactured at Maxwell Labs’ Kearny Mesa plant, the 90 mm rail gun, intended as an anti-tank weapon, had a 38-foot-long barrel and was powered by magnetic pulses. The super-intense magnetic energy enabled it to shoot plastic “bullets” at velocities of up to 9000 miles per hour — which it did, one shot at a time, during the course of some 250 tests carried out at Green Farm from 1986 to 1999. Although the rail gun was to ultimately prove workable, Maxwell needed a larger, more remote test site. Green Farm wound up as nothing more than a dusty collection of tumbledown, wooden-frame shacks, steel-and-concrete bunkers, and piles of debris, all of it buffeted by the wind and surrounded by weeds.
Project Orion didn’t belong exclusively to San Diego, nor did it ever come close to fruition. Yet, its mere presence here — evanescent, incomplete, almost inchoate — was noteworthy, if only by dint of its intended scope. In 1958, a group of physicists, including Freeman Dyson and Theodore Taylor at General Atomics, became obsessed with the notion that deep-space exploration was not only necessary — costs be damned — but feasible. They proposed a gargantuan spaceship, powered by hydrogen bombs, that would travel at unheard-of speed, up to 50,000 miles per hour. True believers, they were apparently unconcerned with issues like radioactive fallout. Initial tests — small-scale mock-ups using conventional explosives — were conducted in Point Loma and, after neighbors complained of the noise, at Green Farm. However, not even the hardest hard-core technocrats, the coldest Cold Warriors — nucleophiles one and all — could see this thing working, so by 1961, Orion was a footnote in The Journal of Bizarre Scuttled Projects.
Because East Elliott, STF, the Forbidden Zone — whatever one chooses to call it — was, for the tenure of its existence, unknown to most San Diegans, it provided an ideal setting for half-truths, lurid rumors, and, in some cases, unpleasant facts that could “neither be confirmed nor denied.” While on his final tour of the area, B.R. took in the Seabees building, which while wholly unremarkable for its prosaic uses, was to B.R. and others quite remarkable for other functions.
The Seabees were essentially Navy “combat mechanics,” men who did for the “materiel” of war what combat medics did for soldiers, sailors, and Marines. As it turned out, the first structure I’d encountered on my runs served as a Seabee training center, with an assortment of offices and small, blast-proof rooms. On one wall, B.R. took note of a large Seabee insignia that portrayed a half-man, half-bee creature firing a machine gun while holding a wrench and a hammer — “multitasking” at its best. Most of the place had been trashed. However, evidence that long after the industrious wartime hymenopteran [Note 1] had flown the hive, inventive teenagers, oblivious to the asbestos in the air, had staged more than a few lively parties there.
See also [ Early BackDrop ]
Notes
- ↑ hymenopteran are bees, wasps and ants
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