Chapter 339: Radar Blobs

Tuesday, April 17, 2007 (Continued)

After it was dark, I flew to collect my A-man suit, putting it on then my black clothes back on top. I flew to the Cascades, then south down among the ridges and trees.

After a couple of hundred miles, I diverted toward some lights to find a spare computer or two and started researching radar detection limits. Five minutes later, I was VERY worried!

I'd assumed that radars didn't work unless their targets contained metal. When the army guys had described our home system to us, that's what they'd said. I knew there were weather radars that could pick up storms, but I'd presumed they worked because of the sheer mass of water involved. Each drop would only reflect a tiny amount of the radar beam, but many cubic miles of raindrops added up to a huge amount of reflected beam. I was a lot smaller than "many cubic miles", so I hadn't worried about it.

I should've worried! There are several different types of radars, some of which are capable of phenomenal feats of detection. I could pick up a phone and rent a radar unit on a trailer that was capable of tracking the flight of an individual moth! If the public could rent mobile radars that could do that, God knows what the military radars were capable of! (And God knows why people would be that interested in a moth.)

Further reading eased my minds somewhat. The good news was that search radars capable of that much discrimination had extremely short ranges. They'd lose track of their moth if it went much more than a mile away from the radar station. There were still some problems though:

• I have a reflective area about a thousand times larger than a moth, and I'm denser so presumably more reflective. Call it 2,000 times worse. That extends the detection range by the fourth root of 2,000, about 6.7 times, giving the stations about an 8-mile radius. (Fourth root because it's an inverse square law going out, and again when coming back.)

• The military could pump more power into the transmitter. Ten times more power would give the station an 80-mile radius for detecting me.

• The military wouldn't need to track me continuously. Over the course of several of my flights, they'd be able to get data from whenever I flew over any of their radars. Eventually they have enough data to take some guesses about where I was coming from. They could move several mobile stations into the state, and then into the general area, and then into our backyard.

Very worried, I kept reading. The next snippet I read was a comment about identifying bird species. There are radars that use the Doppler Effect (called "Doppler Radars") that can tell from the frequency change in the returned signal how fast the target is coming toward, or going away from, the radar station. Some of them have enough discrimination to identify the species of individual birds by how fast their wings are flapping! That's a scary amount of discrimination and precision.

Not so bad was that the military radars are generally tuned to frequencies which give a long range. Those frequencies bounce off metal well, but not off flesh. Airfields which are having bird strike problems often have to set up dedicated bird radars to detect flesh. They're very short range, and I made a strong mental note to approach all military airfields at very low altitude in the future, preferably on foot or bicycle. I'd been lucky that I'd biked to Andrews AFB. I had no idea whether Andrews AFB had bird problems, but they had the presidential jets so it was hard to imagine they didn't have every possible precautionary technology.

Meteorological radar is tuned to a frequency which bounces off water well, and Avian radar to a frequency that bounces off flesh well. It turns out that those two frequencies are effectively the same because flesh is mostly water, and radar readers (whatever that job is called) often have trouble differentiating a rainstorm from a flock of birds. That means I was at risk of being detected by bird watchers as well as by meteorological stations.

The next item I read was very bad. It was a meteorological radar coverage map for the continental USA, which showed that the land area covered is greater than 95%. There are stations dotted in a fairly regular row and column pattern across the entire country, so their range circles touch each other, and there are only a few corners that aren't covered.

Then I realized that the range circles were for detecting cubic miles of rain. I was a lot denser than rain, but tiny in comparison. The meteorological radar stations were sited efficiently, so their ranges only just overlapped. That meant that if their detection range for me was one-tenth of a rainstorm, then their coverage area dropped from nearly 100% to nearly 1%. That was still a worry though, because if they got enough samples they could draw some inferences from my comings and goings.

I imagined that the meteorologists didn't routinely share their data with the military. That might change now that there was an angel flying around, and they might even hand over their recordings. I had no idea whether, or for how long, meteorological radar stations stored their old data. That was a worry, but it offered a hope that they didn't keep it long. Maybe occasional radar glimpses of Majestic Countdown's many dozens of flights would've been lost by now.

A good piece of information was that meteorological radar looks upward. It's not interested in low-level effects, so flying low was my new altitude-of-choice.

Unfortunately, all the comments just above are only about meteorological radar. That and avian radar are mentioned extensively on the internet, but the performance of military radar is hardly mentioned at all so I had to guess about that. If the best publicly available systems could track individual moths, the military ones would obviously be easily capable of tracking me. I hoped it was not a question of capability, but of intent. I guessed that the military hadn't previously been interested in flying flesh (whether birds, moths, bats, or undiscovered angels), but they would be VERY interested now.

I made some mental notes: fly as little as possible, fly very low (underwater would be ideal), make many random direction changes, and worry a lot more about the radars on military aircraft.

The last point was a particularly serious one. An AWACS plane had so much radar gear on it that surely one of them could be tuned to the right frequencies to track me easily. It could follow me wherever I went, regardless of how much zigzagging I did. It could even be used to provide targeting information to a missile fired from miles away. If I saw an AWACS, I'd have to take extreme measures, either defensive or offensive.

Then I thought of something even worse. The Air Force has those very small, high-altitude, unmanned drones. They could mount a suitable radar on one of them and follow me with it, and I wouldn't have a clue. Even with a max-sized sight blob, I wouldn't see one of those little things high above me. There could be one over me now!

#7: <We have to develop a radar blob to see radar with, so we'll be able to fly around trouble areas and will know when we're being tracked. We can experiment on the radar at home to get the blob working initially, then can experience different frequencies by sitting outside an Air Force base and having the blob up in the air above it.>

#14: <Do you think we can get one going?>

#7: <I think we have to, and I think we can. It's just EM radiation, and we know we can see that with a sight blob. It'll just be a sight blob with a frequency-shift. We can see if we can get frequency-shifts working on visible light while we hitchhike home.>

#1: <Haha. You got that right! I'd walk home in preference to flying.>

#12: < Think of those trips we took up to the Cascades for breakfast. We were DAMNED lucky that the meteorological radar stations are well away from the flight path we kept taking.>

#30: <It gives me nervous shivers thinking about how complacent we were about that risk.>

I did some more reading. There were four bands (arbitrary subdivisions of EM frequencies) that seemed to be the key bands, but to play safe I included the bands on either end, giving me six to worry about: UHF (0.3-1 GHz), L (1-2 GHz), S (2-4 GHz), C (4-8 GHz), X (8-12 GHz) and Ku/K/Ka (12-18/18-27/27-40 GHz) bands. I'd combined the three K-bands because they all seemed to be involved in very short-range surveillance, such as traffic cop speed radars.

The long wavelength frequency (L-band) was what was typically used for detecting aircraft under normal conditions. I was confident that our home's radar would use the L-band. The shorter wavelength frequencies were increasingly good at discriminating flesh and small details, but their ranges are shorter because their energy is absorbed and deflected by dust and water in the air. The much longer wavelength UHF radars didn't worry about dust in the air because they can penetrate the ground! That's why they weren't any good at detecting flesh, because their beams passed straight through it!

^

I didn't answer Jonathon's questions from this computer because I didn't want the Government to know I was researching radar. I found a secluded spot and removed my A-man suit. I stole a garbage bag from a house and put the suit in it so I could carry it without people noticing. The A-man suit had been on TV far too much to allow anyone to see even part of it.

I was outside a small town. It was dark, I was a young Black man wearing black clothes, and I didn't look to be a safe pick up, so I walked to the main street, found a public phone, and called for a taxi to take me the 250 road miles to Corvallis. It was expensive, but that was the least of my worries.

I sat in the back and prepared to experiment on frequency-shifting the input from a sight blob. Frequency-shifting seeming like the obvious solution for how to make radar wavelengths visible to my brain, and it'd be FAR easier to learn how to do it with light that I could see, rather than light that was invisible to me.

I had a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve for the first step: I wanted to map one visible spectrum color onto another. There was a very convenient and colorful sticker right in front of me. After having a good look at my target sticker with my eyes, I shut them, looked at the sticker again with a sight blob, then I wished that the light blob sent the picture to me with the yellow parts changed to appear a particular shade of blue that I had in mind.

I concentrated hard for a couple of seconds, and then had complete success, the yellow suddenly changing to exactly the blue I'd imagined. I looked around and noticed that there were other shades of yellow still showing as yellow (obviously, or I wouldn't have noticed them), so whatever it was that the light blob had done, it appeared to be precise.

Before I experimented any more and possibly screwed up my vision permanently, I thought I should check that I could undo the color change. If I was right, there were three ways to reverse the change. I'd try them all:

1. I canceled the sight blob, opened my eyes, and could see the original yellow. I closed my eyes and created another sight blob. The yellow was yellow. I shifted it to blue again.

2. I ordered the sight blob to map that particular shade of blue back to the original shade of yellow that I remembered. That worked and the sticker looked normal, but now anything that shade of blue would appear yellow. There were no examples in the taxi, but I didn't worry about that now; I just canceled the blob, created a new one, then applied the yellow-to-blue shift again.

3. I undid the change simply by wanting the sight blob to go back to normal, without any frequency shifts. That immediately worked.

I repeated the above experiments using the yellow and another color that was in the taxi, so I could better see the effects of what I was doing. The changes worked exactly as they logically should. It was amazing how simple and easy this was. Sight blobs are wonderfully cooperative.

For my next experiment, I wanted to try a range of frequencies rather than one specific shade. Now I tried to imagine a range of yellow shades changing to a range of blues. I struggled to picture that until I remembered a long, drawn out picture of the spectrum I'd seen. I imagined the yellow portion on top of the blue portion, ignoring every other color. I spent a few seconds visualizing that all those yellows transformed into the blues beneath them; and so they did! There were a few shades of yellow in the taxi, and they all changed as I'd wanted.

I ordered the sight blob to stop doing any shifting and my blob's sight returned to normal. I did some practice between other pairs of color ranges, and different widths of ranges. The only difficult part of the process was to make sure I got my visualizations correct for what I wanted done; the light blobs themselves were totally obedient.

#15: <What do we do for the other 249.5 miles of this trip?>

I couldn't do any radar work because I didn't have a radar to play with. I was pretty sure I could - and I was certainly hoping I could - tune a sight blob to pick up radar frequencies. I knew I could 'dial' light blobs to emit through the visible spectrum and into the infrared, so I should be able to do that for receiving light too. The trouble was that my 'dial' didn't come equipped with a calibrated digital readout of the frequencies involved. The 'dial' was a mental visualization crutch, rather than a precise, scientific instrument.

I sent a sight blob a few hundred feet up in the air above the taxi, and tried to tune it to pick up radar frequencies, imagining that whatever frequency I was 'dialing' through mapped to a particular shade of yellow.

To explain that better: I wasn't dialing the input frequency for the whole sight blob. They can see a whole range of frequencies, as is obvious from their giving me color vision. I presume they can detect a much wider range of frequencies than just human-visible light because there's no logical reason for them to have the same constraints as my flesh-and-blood eyeballs, but that flexibility isn't immediately useful to me because my brain can't process information about non-visible frequencies. What I'm attempting to do now, with quite a lot of confidence that it'll work, is keep the sight blob seeing normally, but in addition, any light on a specific dialed-to frequency is to be sent to my brain as if it was light of a particular yellow frequency. Thus when I see that shade of yellow, the source could either be something that is physically yellow, or the dialed-to frequency. I won't be able to tell which type of source it is visually, but should be able to deduce it from the circumstances.

I wasn't the least bit worried about the dangerous frequencies: microwave, gamma wave, etc. First, I was dialing my sight blob in the opposite direction from them (radar is beyond infrared, whereas the high energy, dangerous radiation is beyond ultraviolet). Second, I wasn't emitting the radiation, only seeing what was already present. Third, I knew that sight blobs don't send electromagnetic radiation directly into my brain, but only information about what they perceive. The brain obviously can't process the light itself as it doesn't have eyes in the middle of it.

As I was dialing through the frequencies, I had many yellow flashes as I picked up 'stuff', but I had no idea what they were. They might be different radio or TV stations, cellphones, or whatever else EM frequencies are used for. Visible light is in the mid-E14 hertz range and radar in the mid-E9 hertz range, so there's plenty of room for all sorts of other transmissions to confuse the issue. I wasn't in a tearing hurry to develop the ability, content to wait until I got home so I could do it properly using the radar dish of the top of our home as a known source.

So the only thing I did of note on the way home was get the driver to stop at a public convenience so I could take a piss and also send an email from a nearby computer.

I'd addressed the email to all my usual media to make sure my answers were well publicized, but marked it "Attention: Jonathon Winters of ABC News."

I gave Majestic Countdown and Archangel Michael names, including Majestic Countdown's usual authentication code. The parts of the message that mattered to my plan were: