The Borger area of Texas is a pretty sad place to visit alright..... only worse place I've ever been to was Dugway, Utah. If someone was going to give the United States a enema, that's were it would be done at. It is a military base that use to test VX nerve gas and chemical weapons. It had the longest concrete runway in the United States. They said they could land 5 jets in-line at the same time.
That's the place where almost 7,000 sheep dropped dead back in March of '68. The military had [possibly still has] a huge underground storage complex up there for developement / testing and storing VX nerve gas & chemical weapons. 20 pound's of VX gas was inadvertently sprayed after the jet left the testing grounds... and blew across the country side killing the sheep 30 miles from the test range. There is a mountain range up there that has been hollowed out to store this stuff. When I was up there, there were these huge steel doors leading into the mountain....inside there were barrels of chemicals stored in 55 gal drums, on pallets... stacked high and running for as far as you could see. Don't know if it was true or not, but they said just one barrel of that stuff droped into a main river in China could wipe out the entire population in a week.
Only really interesting part of the stay up there was crawling through the B-29 sister-ship of the Enola Gay that had taken the pictures of the A-Bomb beng dropped on Japan. It was sitting on a runway deteriorating in the weather. It was still slightly radio active so we couldn't spend to much time in it.. but it was certainly interesting to crawl through a Superfortress.
Also, while I was there... a couple of F-15 Eagles were doing some practice dog fights over head and we were listening to the pilot chatter over our radio. They got to close and bumped each other. One went down almost immediately, with the pilot ejecting. We were huddled up under some trees, and lost sight of the other plane. Suddenly, there was a gosh-awful sound of roaring jet engines and right ove the top of us was the second jet trying to make it back to the runway. I'm not kidding you... the black front radar cone had been knocked off and from the ground you could see a jagged hole into the cockpit and the pilot inside fighting the stick. He made it out over the runway barely staying airbore [no lift under his wings] and finally dropped it on the strip. Talk about military police & investigators.. they were crawling all over the place like ants.
Later that night at the little club the base had... the pilot was telling that he wasn't to proud to admit he was scared Sh#$%^ss. That he had to have someone bring him a clean flight suit.
The reason no one goes to Dugway unless they just have to is this---
"Between 1951 and 1969, over 1,600 open air "field trials" using live nerve agent were conducted at Dugway. More than 55,000 chemical rockets, artillery shells, bombs and other munitions were blown up to understand how nerve agent would be dispersed in combat. All totaled, a half million pounds of agent were released to the wind -- that's the equivalent of 3.5 trillion lethal doses. Rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, horses, cows, monkeys and even antelope were used and killed in the tests. Army documents reveal that the tests were not particularly successful. Often, less than 20 percent of the agent hit the target grids. Where the rest of it went is anyone's guess. Sometimes shells and rockets went astray and didn't explode. More than 1,400 square miles of public land in Utah is now contaminated with unexploded ordnance, some of it containing nerve agent. Open air testing was banned in 1969."
