The Rosman Research Station is located in the Pisgah National Forest of North Carolina's Smoky Mountains, near Balsam Grove, NC, off Route 215 approximately 11 kilometers north of Route 64. The station, which closed in 1994, was operated by approximately 250 NSA, Bendix Field Engineering and TRW employees.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration began operations at the Rosman Spaceflight Tracking Station in 1963, and ceased activities there in January 1981. During NASA's tenure the station supported a number of space projects, including the Apollo and Apollo-Soyuz missions. The station at Rosman was turned over to the General Services Administration by NASA on 1 February 1981. The facility was converted by the Department of Defense for use as a Communications Research Station, a process which was completed in early July 1981. Initially there were approximately 35 contract personnel living in the area, but when the project became operational in July, this number increased to approximately 75 employees. The NSA role at Rosman apparently began almost immediately thereafter. By 1985 this number was reported to have grown to 250 employees, with annual payroll at $5 million, an average of $20,000 a year [The Asheville Citizen 20 June 1985]. For FY85 NSA requested $500,000 for construction of an electric substation to provide additional electric transformer capacity that is required to support station operations. It is difficult to ascertain the total number of satellite receiving antenna at the facility. These at least include two very large dishes, approximately 27.5 feet in diameter (the size of the biggest dish left by NASA), and a smaller 6.2 meter radome.

The Rosman Station was used to intercept telephone and other communications traffic carried by commercial and other communications satellites in geostationary orbit over the Western hemisphere. Potential targets of interest could include Latin American military, diplomatic and commercial traffic as well as domestic US traffic and drug traffickers in the Caribbean.

Source: http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/
Updated on Monday, December 23, 1996 - 7:06:21 AM
Created by John Pike
Maintained by Steven Aftergood

 Homeland Security Buys Town, Playas, N.M., for Training

REUTERS 23may03

SANTA FE, NM—The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has bought for about $5 million the small New Mexico ghost town of Playas, and plans to transform it into a terrorist response training center, officials said on Friday. Training at the 1,840-acre town about 40 miles north of the Mexican border, could provide training for U.S. Marines in urban warfare and a first responders program that includes testing responses to various terrorist bombing possibilities, they said.

The facility could also be used to look at ways in which biological and chemical warfare may affect a small town, said an official responsible for running the training center.

New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, an undergraduate and graduate school specializing in science and engineering, will run the training center, which was purchased for "close to $5 million dollars" from Phelps Dodge, said Lonnie Marquez, acting vice-president of administration and finance at New Mexico Tech.

"We've been pursuing this since the town was first made available so we're pretty excited," he said. "Our programs will be in support of Homeland Security."

Playas was built in the early 1970s to house the employees and infrastructure of the Phelps Dodge copper smelter, which shut down in 1999 leaving a virtual ghost town. About 40 families still live in the town, but may have to move once the federal government finalizes the purchase, Marquez said.

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Is Dugway's Expansion an Alien Concept?

By Joe Bauman
Deseret Morning News

      Alien hunters and nerve agent contamination may be prompting Dugway Proving Ground to seek to expand its size.

Officials at the Army base are closed-mouthed about why they want to acquire a huge swath of adjacent land, mostly under control of the Bureau of Land Management. They have not even spelled out how much they want.
      But they confirmed that the gigantic military reservation filed documents seeking approval for expansion studies.
      The amount of land under discussion ranges from 55 square miles to 145 square miles — and if the nearby Dugway Mountains are included, that increases by 25 square miles.
      One motive for acquiring land may be to keep Dugway's expected anti-terrorism training secret at a time when the base is coming under telephoto scrutiny by alien hunters.
      Security hassles could grow as vexing for Dugway as they have been for many years at the military base at Groom Lake, Nev.
      Groom Lake, also called Area 51, is 90 miles north of Las Vegas. It is famous in UFO lore as supposedly housing a crashed flying saucer. UFO fanatics have brought it under intense surveillance.
      Top-secret military aircraft were developed at Groom Lake, including the U-2 and Blackbird spy planes as well as the Stealth fighter. The fact that no crashed saucers have been documented there hasn't deterred alien hunters from staking out the base with high-powered gear.
      A few years ago, a rumor circulated that secret activities at Groom Lake had been transferred to Dugway. Now alien hunting is taking place just outside the Utah base.
      One hunter-oriented Internet site is headed "Dugway Proving Ground — The New Groom Lake?" Located at www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/dugway.html, it displays an overhead view of Dugway facilities. "It is by far the most secretive facility in Utah as well as the most controversial," the caption reads.

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Dugway Expansion a Mystery

April 2, 2005

Are plans due to tainted soil — or maybe UFOs?

By Lee Davidson
Deseret Morning News

Or does it want to keep UFO-hunting groups farther away from the secretive base because they now closely watch it, suspecting that it stores and works on alien spacecraft as a "new Area 51"?
      Pick either theory or one of your own because the Army isn't going to say. Five months after being asked, the Army has officially refused to release documents explaining why and where exactly it might expand Dugway.
      In a letter denying a Freedom of Information Act request filed in October by the Deseret Morning News, Brig. Gen. James R. Myles, commander of the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, states that the Army had identified "a number of documents ... regarding proposals to enlarge the boundaries of Dugway Proving Ground," confirming it is indeed looking at expanding the base that is already larger than Rhode Island.
      But, he wrote, "we must withhold the documents in their entirety under Exemption 5 of the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act). All of the documents found responsive to your request are predecisional and deliberative in nature."
      That exemption allows — but does not require — government agencies to withhold "predecisional" documents that debate proposals to help encourage open and frank discussion about policy between subordinates and superiors, and to protect against premature disclosure of proposed policies.
      The Morning News immediately appealed the denial to the secretary of the Army, arguing that release of the information would be in the public interest and would reduce confusion and speculation about why the military is considering expansion of the base.
      The newspaper first reported in October that the Army was looking at the expansion, as rumored by nearby landowners. At that time, the base issued a short statement to the newspaper saying, "Dugway has requested permission to study the possibility of increasing the size of Dugway's training and testing ranges."

The Army has not said how big an expansion it is considering nor exactly where.
      In 1988, the Army also proposed expanding it to obtain 66 square miles south of the base after studies showed it was contaminated by old tests of chemical weapons.
      That expansion never occurred, in part because the U.S. Bureau of Land Management — which owns most of that land — opposed the expansion and called for the Army to clean up any old munitions there instead.
      Also, siblings Louise, Douglas and Allan Cannon — who jointly own land in the area and hold numerous mining claims there — have questioned publicly whether the military is pushing a new expansion to forcibly obtain their lands, where contamination occurred but the military has refused to clean.
      Court documents from Cannon lawsuits disclose that the Army attacked the Cannon's old family mines with 3,000 rounds of chemical arms for tests at the end of World War II. It also bombed the surface of 1,425 acres of Cannon family-owned land above the mines with more than 23 tons of chemical arms, including deadly mustard agent, hydrogen cyanide and choking agent Phosgene.
      The Army says it had permission from the Cannons' grandfather for that testing. But the younger Cannons say contracts only recently found required cleaning of the land — and failure to do that has prevented working potentially lucrative gold mines. Courts dismissed their claims saying they were filed too late.
      "They bombed the heck out of it and contaminated our lands — and the surrounding (public) lands. And they won't clean it up," Louise Cannon complained last year.
      Meanwhile, hunters for aliens also said they suspect Dugway is trying to expand to keep them farther away. Several of them report seeing from afar mysterious Army convoys with trucks carrying under tarps some oval or circular objects they conjecture could be alien flying saucers.
      Dave Rosenfeld, president of Utah UFO Hunters, has said hunters of aliens have been watching Dugway closely. Many groups operate Web sites contending that secret work on aliens and their spacecraft that they say once occurred at Nevada's Area 51 have been transferred to Dugway.

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