The Strange Green Glow Up In The Hills

Up in the hills about ten miles from my house, sometimes weird stuff would go on in the hills. Government stuff, they said, like stuff affiliated with the military and the Department of the Defense, or DOD. It was owned by Rocketdyne, but also NASA, the Department of Energy(DOE), Boeing, all these Aerospace companies were doing stuff up there. What, we didn't know exactly, it was there business and we weren't to know about it. They tested rockets, that was all we knew.....he it was the height of the Cold War, got to get those Commies, beat them at their own game. We would sometimes hear noises, smelled odd smells, hear sonic booms that would shake the houses and rattle the windows and scare us. That was what it was like growing up in the Atomic Age and the Cold War, being afraid of worrying about fighting against the Soviets and Communism. Sometimes at night you might see this weird, green glow way up in the hills coming from the Santa Susana mountains above Chatsworth, the next suburb west of us in Northridge. We wondered what the hell that was....Aliens? Atomic energy? Rockets? A haunted glow from the former, burnt out Spahn Ranch were the Manson Family hung out and killed people there, and the evil still hung around? It was kind of creepy.

Back from what I heard in the late 1940's or early 1950's when the Atomic Age was in full swing, the Government was looking to implement their Atomic Energy program. After the horrific aftermath of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan to end WWII and show worldwide dominance, America had to keep up with making bigger and better bombs capable of even worse destruction. Also, they thought atomic energy was the way of the future, but they also had no idea what they were messing with, back in those days they treated atomic energy/radioactive materials like it was medieval alchemy. They handled it with very little protective wear, disposed of it improperly, and exposed the outlying communities to radiation/radioactive poisoning without telling them and couldn't have cared less when people sickened and died. This included employees who handled the radioactive materials, government workers, military, etc., and radiation poisoning and pollution didn't stay in one place, it spread wherever it went. So if a worker touched it or was exposed to it, they could take it home and exposed their family and friends and neighbors to it-it was like a contagious disease. So the government was looking for a remote area not too far from Los Angeles and from military installations, and found it in a lovely old area where the stagecoaches used to come through as well as the trains that connected Ventura County to Los Angeles via the San Fernando Valley. In those days the western San Fernando Valley was still quite agrarian, with orange and walnut grove, horse ranches, poultry farms, and wide open spaces, and not many housing tracts west of Sepulveda Blvd. There were no freeways back then except US HWY 101, and that was only in Los Angeles-so plenty of space, and the studios used a lot of the area up in Santa Susana Pass for shooting western movies and tv shows, there was a small smattering of homes down the way, and a lake. Other than that, plenty of land for the Government to buy up and begin their nefarious experiments and tests.....

When I was in high school, my parents had long since split up and my two older, pain in the ass siblings were long gone, much to my relief. My mother, who I barely got along with, was gone over to her boyfriend's house on the weekends, and my father pretty much wanted nothing to do with me as he had a new life with the Stepmonster. I basically felt abandoned and neglected and that left me to my own devices, and I was out with my friends on the weekends when I wasn't working. So if one of us managed to get some booze and weed(back in the late 1980's no one carded us when we bought cigarettes), we would go out driving looking for a place to hang, have a drink(but not get too wasted), have a hit of weed or two, just hang out, listening to heavy metal in our car stereos, talking about which up and coming heavy metal concerts we were going to attend. We would usually head up towards the Porter Ranch area of Northridge, where the more upper-middle class/well-off people lived, it was not as developed then and there places you could go hang out without being disturbed. You had to go way high up there and then it was cool and have your fun; so one Friday night after I got done with work I called my friend Brian and I said, "Dude, I'm gonna go back to my house, change out of my work clothes, grab a bottle of booze out of the liquor cabinet, can you come pick me up? I just bought a tape from Testament, I'll bring it". So soon after my friend picked me up and we were off to meet up with the rest of our friends up in our designated spot way up in Porter Ranch.

We were stoked to see each other, cigarettes were lit, liquor was poured and shared, heavy metal tunes were blasting from a car stereo, and soon someone produced the needed weed and it was passed around. Various conversations about heavy metal concert experience, various high school hijinks, teachers we hated, experiences in the Valley, dodging the cops, etc., laughs and good times shared. All of a sudden the sound Megadeth's "Peace Sells" was drowned out by this big blast and a weird green glow lit up the hills. We all lit up green and were petrified with fear as we basked green in it and then all of a sudden we literally in unison screamed, "OH SHIT!" and dove under cars or behind cars or large rocks for shelter. I had hit the ground and crawled under a car with another friend and we closed are eyes and I was praying under my breath, "Oh God I don't wanna die". We must have been under there a couple of minutes before the noise died down, and we began creeping back out again, but there was still a faint green glow above the hill. "What the hell was that?" someone asked, "I have no damned idea, but it scared the shit out of me, something ain't normal going on up here, that is for sure", I said, as I took a big swig of creme de menthe from the bottle. As we were trying to calm down, that soon ended by a large BOOM! as the earth shook and our ear drums nearly burst-a sonic boom and we were very close to it, and it nearly knocked us on our feet! There was another green glow, and at this point, I think we had all had enough, and now we could barely hear each other. "That's it, screw it! let's get the f%ck out here!" someone yelled and that is exactly what we did, because this place was giving us major creeps. What the hell was this place? An alien test sight? UFO landing place? Rockets coming and going? We had no idea, and just decided to try and go get something to eat at Denny's but we just kind of picked at our food as our nerves were frazzled and we were jumpy. What was that, we were trying to talk in hushed tones as we smoked and picked at our food(back then there were smoking sections in restaurants), and I said, maybe it was the government, don't they have some type of test site around there, in the hills above Chatsworth were they do a bunch of secret squirrel stuff? They have been since the 1950's, God only knows what it is, maybe they have some kind of Hangar 18 or Area 51 thing there with aliens, or a rocket test site thing. All I know is sometimes I see weird glowing stuff late at night, and some of those areas are forbidden and the government will chase you away from there. I wonder what they are hiding exactly? We all had our theories, but it would not be until well into my adulthood when I would find out just how sinister it was until I would start experiencing health problems and some of my friends would start to sicken and die around me. Then my stepfather too....

In the late 1950's, the landscape in the western San Fernando Valley had changed quite a bit, new housing tracts sprung up all over the place, gone were a lot of the open spaces. Chatsworth, Northridge, Granada Hills, Mission Hills, Sepulveda(later North Hills), Canoga Park, Woodland Hills, West Hills, Bell Canyon, Reseda, etc., sprung up and families moved in to these ranch-style homes often that had orange trees and walnut trees left over from the groves that they were built one. I grew up in such a house in Northridge, a rambling, low-slung, three bedroom, two and a quarter bathroom house on a quarter acre lot with orange trees that were once part of a grove, later my parents added a swimming pool because summers in Northridge were HOT. We would live our cookie-cutter lives with our family problems closeted on the inside festering and rotting so God forbid no one would notice, but quite a few of us grew up dysfunctional anyways with growing resentments towards our seemingly indifferent and uncaring parents who came from either the Silent Generation or Baby Boomer Generation. The Silent Generation, to me, was far worse, and far more selfish, and these were the ones who were all for the dropping of the atomic bombs and the pollution and the atomic age and the ripping up of the trees and pouring concrete and asphalt over it all and turning it ito urband and suburban blight. Beautiful old Victorian home? Tear it down and put ugly dingbat apartments-pave paradise put up a parking lot. What all those nifty fifties families didn't realize was that the government and Rocketdyne had built something they were keeping secret they were hoping could power all of Los Angeles with electricity-a nuclear reactor. In 1959, it all went horribly wrong, and instead of warning the public, they covered it up, as well as all their other dirty dealings.

In 1959, something went horribly wrong at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, and that was a partial nuclear meltdown, which was 555 times worse than Three Mile Island. Workers were exposed to deadly rates of radiation that soon made them sick and died, or would later cause them and their families to sicken and die. Rocketdyne and the government covered it up, and the meltdown exposed the outlying communites of the western San Fernando Valley to the East and Simi Valley to the west to be exposed to radiation. They just did not tell anyone, and this went on for twenty years until 1979, until a professor and some of his students from UCLA uncovered this around the time of the Three Mile Island accident. It just wasn't this accident, it was decades of the dumping, burning, burying and airing of toxic and radioactive chemicals, heavy metals, etc., a lot of these chemicals long since banned by the EPA. These include Dioxin, TCB's, TCE's, PCB's just to name a few, and they cause cancer, auto-immune diseases, including those that attack the thyroid, etc. They knew and didn't care, and did not tell anyone, so people from the late 1950's through the 1990's until this place was shut down were being exposed to all sorts of toxic and radioactive poisoning, including pregnant women and young children. That included my mother when she was pregnant with me.....but I digress to what we were seeing as teenagers when we would take off into the hills. That evil green glow of death, that is what it was, a toxic green glow of death, of deadly mix of radiation, toxic chemicals and heavy metals, etc., that has taken the lives of so many, and continues to do so. The lives of my friends/classmates from my high school, neighbors, even my stepfather-many of us have had the unenviable task of burying our loved ones. I am fifty now, and in the last ten years I don't have enough digits to count on the amount of friends I have lost and had to help bury who were sickened and killed by the infamous Santa Susana Field Laboratory.

I, too, was made sick by this place; my exposure to the pollution began literally within the womb. No one was telling any of those pregnant mothers not to drink that water, or to bath in it, or eat the oranges that may contain the pollution that grew from the soil there, or breathe the contaminated air, etc. Who knows how it affected my development, but as a result, I development ovarian and reproductive cysts, as well as Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, an auto-immune disease which attacks and destroys the thyroid. Neither of those run in my family, so where did they come from? Well, after speaking to a lot of my classmates, most of them female, turns out a lot of them also have Hashimoto's, some even have Grave's Disease(another auto-immune disease which attacks the thyroid), and a few have thyroid cancer. Many others are afflicted with a variety of different auto-immune diseases as well, and then so many cancers. A mere coincidence? I think not, and this place keeps on making people sick and keeps on killing-the types of cancers I especially keep seeing are glioblastoma, eye cancer, leukemia, bone cancer, breast cancer, stomach cancer, and one of my closest friends got a very rare cancer, cancer of the thymus. Her father also is battling the same awful, uncommon neuro-muscular disease that killed my stepdad, CDIP-Chronic Demylenating Inflammatory, Polyneuropathy. Again, it's no coincidence. The evil green glow of death is still up there, still killing, and I fight my health battles everyday like so many others. That horribly polluted area is now a superfunded clean-up site owned by Boeing, and they stonewall the government and will never compensate those made sick and who lost their loved ones. The evil, green glowing light is still up there, glowing faint but malevolent, still polluting, still killing, and I wonder if the day will ever come if it will ever die out? That remains to be seen.....