Pete,

When I first landed in Albuquerque in August, 1965, I was told by the locals, when they could be found, that Albuquerque had only one season of clear skies, sunshine, and blowing enchantment. Have things really changed so much that you can really distinguish winter from spring, from summer, and from fall? If so, I guess there is something to Al Gore’s climate change and global warming. I took up tennis because it could be played on the base the year around mostly in warm sunshine. I took up distance cycling because the sun nearly always shined, and I didn’t have to worry about rain, except the solid, blowing kind. If the liquid kind did fall, it all dried up five minutes after it fell, sooner when one rode a bicycle.

I can’t believe that there are four seasons now in Albuquerque after 45 years. I have got to return and see for myself. I suppose New Year’s stuff is not always the same old stuff.

Errol

Things have changed if the stuff that the wind kicks up now is only dust. We called it “enchantment”. New Mexico not only called itself the “Enchanted State”, but the stuff that the wind kicked up was so different to the pollen and stuff blown by the wind in Alabama. It was indeed the enchanted state because aclimation required at least 18 months for me. It took me that long to get use to a land without seasons. I had no transportaion, other than my feet and a bicycle. I couldn’t go east of the Sandias or north to Glorieta to see the colorful aspen in the fall. Although I could sometime see the snow on top of the Sandias from afar, I was unable to get there to see what was really happening. The Rio Grande valley seemed just about as green in the winter as it did in the summer. From my worldview at the time (KAFB, Sandia Base, Monsanto Base, and the southeastern and eastern Albuquerque Heights), there appeared to me, just as the locals had said when I first arrived, that there was essentially only one season. It was certainly true in comparison to what I had known in Alabama for the first 23 years of my life. It was different. I suppose that the worse part of the aclimation was getting use to the elevation: the dry mountain air, the dry winter wind that felt so good for the first five minutes, then it chilled me to the bone for the next 10 minutes. After that, I had no feeling at all. It was so different to the damp cold in Alabama where one froze at the moment of contact. Then, the incessant, cracked sinus and nose bleed. For 18 months, I thought something terrible was wrong with me. Then, I found myself aclimated, and I loved every minute of it. To this day, I really miss it.

I will never forget the day that I visited Uncle Renzo in Thoreau. I arrived at his house before daylight on the bus after traveling all night from Albuquerque after my flight from Birmingham. After a refreshing nap, I walked out into the garage where Uncle Ren was working on his car, and there dominating the landscape was the biggist mountain that I had ever seen in my life: Mt. Taylor. It was big, so big that the top of it was obscured by clouds, which made the land seem even more enchanting. Thus began my four-year pilgrimage in the “Enchanted State”.

Like Jesus and the shepherds of ancient times, it was finally a joy to work with the sheep. I had never been around sheep before. They were so docile, so gentle, and so innocent. I good stick a hyperdermic syringe into their bodies and draw their blood, and they wouldn’t even flinch or kick or even “bat an eye”. Humans would never take so nicely to a hyperdermic syringe. It was so sad, though, to see them sicken, lose all their wool, stop eating, and die as a result of the radiation dose that we gave them. I tried my best to put it from my mind with the thought that it was necessary to prevent it from happening to our troops in combat in the event of a nuclear war, but it was a very high price to pay even for our troops. My favorite was a solid black sheep which we raised from a bottle after the pathologist cut it alive and kicking from its mother’s womb on the autopsy table in one of our radiation experiments. This black sheep was grown by the time I left in December of 1968. I cried as I said goodby as if I was saying goodby to my own kid.

Pete,

Farmers raise sheep for wool and meat. The AF acquired (not raised)them for radiation effects research because sheep, at 80 to 120 pounds, had a similar body mass as that of a human, and the distance between its vital organs as well as the size of its vital organs were similar. But don’t spread it around too much because there is a lot of controversy still of the research on animals that the AF is still doing at Brooks in Texas. There is none being done on animals at Kirtland any more, and there hasn’t been since the Goat Farm closed and became a riding stable in the early Seventies. I barely got in on the controversial, yet vital, research myself. Even in the late Sixties the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty banning atmospheric testing had already been signed, and the research was already winding down. Now, our country has de-emphasized nuclear research so much, and so many of the knowledgeable people have either died or retired, I doubt if the country has the capacity to make a new nuclear weapon without another major Manhattan Project type effort. NASA is already having trouble getting plutonium for its deep space mission now that Russia won’t sale them any.

Pete,

There is nothing top secret about the U. S. Air Force’s radiation effects research on animals. It never was, and still isn’t top secret (or even secret for that matter). It is was (and is) very controversal however especially with the PITA people. The AF first proposed using purebred beagle dogs. This proposal was really controversal. Sheep were finally used because their use generated less controversy, and sheep were more similar physiologically to humans, at least insofar as the absorption of radiation and, thus, radiation damage was concerned. In spite of the controversy, I still feel that it was a much needed research, especially that which is still ongoing at Brooks. The possibility (and probability) of nuclear warfare is with us to stay. The more that we know about the way it can kill us; the better off we are.

The AF had nothing to do with the cattle mutilations certainly not while I was a part of it, and I doubt if they had anything to do with it after I left. That was done by either your UFO aliens or domestic terrorist thugs. There are some of the latter running around the Southwest. I’m not sure about the former.

The Air Force never mutilated or mistreated the sheep, which were treated like patients in a hospital. In fact, they received better medical care than most patients in many hospitals, and it was all free to the sheep. They had a government-option, socialized medical care system long before President Obama was born. An animal received a thorough medical examination along with appropriate blood work before it was placed in a project. None were supposed to be pregnant, but it was often so difficult for the Vet to tell rather or not an animal was in the early stages of pregnancy that some were missed like the black sheep that I mentioned in an earlier blog.

Blood specimens were drawn every morning at eight o’clock sharp. The same chemistries, hematological, and serological tests were done on these specimens as would have been done in the best hospitals in this land using the same methods and using better equiment than most smaller hospitals have. Even an amino acid profile was run. Most hospitals don’t routinely do that, and most don’t even have the capability of doing it. We had a better Vet Staff than the entire county of Pickens in Alabama that I had known about prior to this work. There was even a skilled resident pathologist available to autopsy the animal in appropriately clean and sterile surroundings after the animal did succumb taking many, many tissue specimens as he went. These tissue specimens were prepared into microscopic slides by skilled histological technicians and pathologically examined as they would have in any hospital in this land.

The animals never got any sicker from the radiation exposure than any GI would have similarly exposed in the field in the event of a nuclear war. They didn’t suffer any more than that GI would have suffered. They received the same great medical care that that GI would have received with the exception that their remains were not sent back to their relatives for burial. This was before OSHA and the EPA. Their remains were simply dumped in a landfield after their usefulness to science was over.