So, who did fry those car locks? By Roger Franklin
March 7, 2004 Even in a town where the lovestruck can select from a roster of Elvis lookalikes to marry them at 4am, what happened three weeks ago in Las Vegas was pretty strange, even by the locals' standards. Late on the morning of February 21 - nobody is too precise about the exact time, initial location, or actual identity of the first caller - someone rang a locksmith and complained the remote-control locking system on the caller's late-model car was refusing to respond. The old-fashioned key, linked to the same circuitry, wouldn't work either, so could the locksmith send over a technician to fix whatever had gone wrong? A couple of minutes later, another locksmith's phone rang. Different caller. Same problem. By the end of the day, the best estimate is that police, fire brigade, locksmiths, car dealerships and tow-truck services had received at least 200 calls from motorists, and many who are still puzzling over the February 21 incident put the figure as high as five times that. "Maybe it's those little green men," joked Mike Estrada, a spokesman for the US Air Force's Nellis Air Base, about 160 kilometres north of Vegas. He was referring to the fabled Area 51 military research facility, which sits smack in the middle of Nellis's bombing range and where UFO buffs, conspiracy theorists and nutters of all persuasions have long maintained that the Pentagon picks apart space aliens and their crashed flying saucers. This time, the likely culprit, according to some, was a top-secret test of equipment intended to fry an enemy's circuitry. Is this the biggest exercise in paranoia since a drug-addled Hunter S. Thompson mistook the desk clerk at Circus Circus for a man-eating lizard?
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Solar flares and static electricity have both been ruled out. Thus, by default, speculation returns to the rumoured goings-on at Nellis. And there, even though the evidence is circumstantial, the trail that begins in the desert is littered with tantalising clues. Take what happened in March 2001, when the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson returned to its home port of Bremerton in Washington State. Car locks went crazy there, too, although in a much smaller area.
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http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/06/1078464695634.html