Rob and the Hollow Mountain

Early one Sunday afternoon I decided to come in for work. Usually I’m a nighttime gal, but I thought my luck might carry if I started early for a change. The club was empty aside from three men. One man was already conversing with another dancer, another looked like a migrant worker, the last one was a bookish looking older white man with a bald head, mustache, and glasses, wearing a blue and white plaid shirt over a small potbelly. I chose the old white man *surprise surprise*.

Me: Hi, may I sit on you?

He peered up at me through his thick lenses and pursed his lips under his white broomstick bristle mustache.

Him: Sure. I haven’t seen you before. Are you new?

I always say I’m new because men don’t want to know they’re talking to a seasoned stripper. They want to believe you’re fresh and inexperienced, lacking standards for things like tipping and nightly monetary goals.

Me: Somewhat. I’ve been here for a few months.

Him: You must only work nights.

Me: Yeah. I’ve also never worked a Sunday before.

Him: That must be the reason.

Me: So what do you?

Him: I’m retired.

Me: Congratulations!

Him: Thank you?

Me: What did you do before you left the workforce?

Him: I was an engineer.

Me: What kind?

Him: Mechanical, aeronautics.

Me: Did you work at Boeing?

Him: No, actually. I worked at NORAD out in Colorado. Have you heard of Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs?

Me: I’m afraid I haven’t.

Him: Well, back in the 1950’s, the US government hollowed out the mountain and built a multi-building army facility to track their satellites and other things.

Me: What!?

Him: Yes. It was classified for many years.

Me: Like Area 51?

Him: Kinda.

Me: What were you working on out there?

Him: I handled a lot of classified projects, mostly editing code for satellites. It was very stressful. I tried to know as little as possible. I didn’t want to be in charge of classified material.

Me: You didn’t want to accidentally compromise information?

Him: Essentially. I wasn’t interested in what they were doing. I was only concerned with performing my job.

Me: How did you edit code?

Him: Back then it was all printed out. I was to check for errors. I would receive it, write in my edits in a red pen, and return it to the engineer who wrote the original code.

Me: How did you know your edits were correct if you were only looking at paper? Were you just looking for command inconsistencies or incorrect punctuation?

Him: Yes. I knew what it should look like.

Me: Could you glean what the program was supposed to do by reading the code?

Him: I knew it was receiving a message sent by another computer, and when that message was received, it would set into motion a response operation. I wasn’t sure what it did exactly. It wasn’t of interest to me.

Me: Were your edits accurate?

Him: They were. The other engineer would take a week to correct the code and send it back to me for further edits. In the meantime I was playing around and I wrote a test program to check to see if the original code would function properly. The irony is— and this is all declassified now, I actually learned about it on YouTube years later— the program we were working for was to be used for a spy satellite that would be used to take pictures using film. When the roll of film was finished, the satellite would descend into Earth’s atmosphere, and release the film carton, at which point a specialize plane would catch it in the air. Except that it never made it to space. The satellite blew up for essentially the same reason the Challenger blew up: because of a joint failure at liftoff. The rockets had a kind of o-ring seal, and that seal was not the right material to handle the cold of liftoff. So the satellite exploded before it even made it to space.

Me: All that work, gone in an instant. And it wasn’t even your fault.

Him: Oh well, it happens.

Me: That must have been an expensive loss.

Him: Each satellite launch costs millions of dollars. It was very expensive. They never got to use my code, however I will say that the program I wrote to check coding function is now widely used. Go figure.

Me: Go figure, indeed. I know this is a bit late, but would you like a dance?

Him: I don’t get dances anymore. But I will tip you on stage.

He tipped me $40, and I wasn’t too disappointed because I’d enjoyed the conversation. Afterwards I did some research on the NORAD base in Cheyenne mountain. Apparently after drilling a massive entry hole, they used 500 tons of explosives to hollow out the mountain. It contains 11 multistory buildings built on coils to withstand earthquakes. The mountain was to act as a cover in the case of nuclear warfare. The buildings are encased in steel and granite in order to be “blast proof.” I asked if the facility was built in a mountain to avoid visibility from space. He informed me the entrance is quite visible, even from the local airport. Now all of this is common knowledge, and has made appearances in popular culture. NORAD was even offering public tours, but suspended them in 1999 due to security concerns.