Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Valley has keyless encounters of the weird kind

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 18:50:06 -0500

Saturday, February 21, 2004
Valley has keyless encounters of the weird kind

By JULIET V. CASEY, J.M. KALIL and KEITH ROGERS
REVIEW-JOURNAL
Was it the storm clouds, sun spots or Area 51?
By late Friday afternoon, some locksmiths, car dealerships and towing
companies had been flooded with calls about mysteriously malfunctioning
keyless vehicle entry devices.
There were nearly as many theories as there were lockouts. But there
were no firm answers as to why the remote devices stopped working.
"Maybe it 's those little green men up north," said Nellis Air Force
Base
spokesman Mike Estrada, whose own keyless entry system failed. "Are
there sun spots? I've been trying to figure it out. It happened to me
right
after lunch."

Estrada resorted to using his key to unlock his car door, but that set
off his alarm.
ABC Locksmiths received 30 calls from drivers stumped by the failure of
the key systems. Quality Towing received about 25 calls, and two Ford
dealerships reported receiving scores of calls about the problem.

But ABC dispatcher Milo Ferguson didn't need to field any calls to know
something was amiss.

"My car is one of them," Ferguson said. "It's some kind of electrical
disturbance. Either that or a nuclear bomb went off a few miles from
here."
Jerry Bussell, Gov. Kenny Guinn's adviser on homeland security, ruled
out terrorism and described the phenomenon as a "frequency problem."
"This is an anomaly that we're going to check out," Bussell said.
The Country Ford dealership in Henderson, which had handled more than
100 calls by late Friday afternoon, contacted the national Ford
headquarters for an explanation.

Katie Baumann, service operator for the dealership, said the Ford
company headquarters informed her that "a lot of static electricity in
the air could be messing up the radio waves" the devices use.
Local forecasters said they doubted the widespread failures could be
attributed to any strange weather patterns.

"We've heard about it, and we don't think so," said Steve Johnson of the

National Weather Service in Las Vegas.

Friday's cloudy weather made Bill O'Donnell doubt the theory of static
interference. O'Donnell, a research associate at the University of
Nevada,
Las Vegas Physics Department and an electrical engineer, said that in
"damp weather like we're having today, there won't be much of a static
charge in the air. The charge just won't build up in these conditions."

Another possible source of the problem: the sun.
"Solar flares can produce and eject large numbers of charge particles,
and
usually the Earth's magnetic field deflects them before they enter the
atmosphere," said chemistry and physics Professor Malcolm Nicol, the
director of the High Pressure Science and Engineering Center at UNLV.
"But if they are very large, they have been known to destroy the
electronics systems in satellites and cause other problems down here."
However, the Big Bear Solar Observatory in Big Bear, Calif., reported
low solar activity Friday.
According to the Federal Communications Commission, the low-power radio
frequency transmitters inside keyless entry devices are similar to those
found in other everyday items such as garage door openers,
remote-controlled toys, cordless telephones, building alarm systems and
the rapidly spreading wireless fidelity computer networks, which are
commonly referred to as "wi-fi."
Paul Oei, an electronics engineer with the Los Angeles office of the
FCC, said keyless entry systems operate on unlicensed frequencies. The
devices can fail when they are near an antenna emitting high radio
frequency energy.  But that scenario would affect only vehicles in a
limited area, he said.
Oei said he has never investigated a problem similar to Friday's
phenomenon, but he recalled hearing about an incident years ago in which
garage-door openers stopped working in an area when Air Force One was
nearby.
"Who knows what the military could be using at any given time?" he said.

At least some Ford and General Motors keyless entry systems use the
same radio spectrum bands that are used in military operations,
according
to the Web site of the U.S. Commerce Department's National
Telecommunications and Information Administration.

"These bands are heavily used worldwide for critical military
air-traffic
control and tactical training communications," the site states.

John Pike, director of globalsecurity.org, a defense and intelligence
policy organization based near Washington, D.C., said military
technology could easily be responsible for Friday's phenomenon. One such
operation is jamming, which involves the release of electromagnetic
energy to interfere with an enemy's radar detection capability.
Pike noted that particularly in Nevada, the military has a number of
unacknowledged programs in jamming and radar and high-powered
microwave weapons, any of which might have the potential to bring chaos
to certain frequencies.
Estrada said Nellis officials checked into the possibility that military
aircraft capable of sending out electronic jamming signals were
involved, but they didn't believe that was the case.
"We've got a jammer in the inventory, but I don't think we've got any
out
here, let alone flying," he said.

Even if electronic warfare aircraft were flying, they operate at much
different frequencies than commercial devices, such as garage-door
openers and remote keyless entry systems, Estrada explained.

"The military is certainly capable of fibbing about these things," Pike
said.
"But, for the military to have done it, they would have to have
seriously
miscalculated the effects of some test."

Friday's phenomenon occurred as Nellis officials were preparing for next
week's Red Flag air combat training exercise. The exercise, which
involves dozens of fighter jets, bombers and other military aircraft
from around the world, begins Monday and runs through March.
Chuck Clark, of the rural Lincoln County community of Rachel, is an Area
51 watchdog and researcher who monitors the government's classified
installation near the dry lake bed of Groom Lake, 90 miles north of Las
Vegas.
Clark said some of the high-tech equipment that he and other Area 51
buffs believe exists at the installation routinely cause odd occurrences
in Rachel similar to what many people in Clark County experienced
Friday.
"We get electronic jamming all the time," he said by telephone.
News reports of a similar phenomenon several years ago in Washington
state suggested the outages were linked to the arrival of military
aircraft carriers to Bremerton.
In March 2001, the keyless entry failures began at the same time the
aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson returned to Bremerton. Then in April of
that year, the outages began one day after the carrier USS Abraham
Lincoln arrived at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.
Review-Journal writers Omar Sofradzija and Carri Geer Thevenot
contributed to this report.

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Feb-21-Sat-2004/news/23271330.html

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