This story starts with my dad, Tom Emig, finding a new job in 1980. My parents, myself, and my sister all grew up in Ohio, though we moved nearly every year when I was a kid. My dad was a draftsman/engineer at Plymouth Locomotive Works in early 1980, in Plymouth, Ohio. Early that year, rumors started circulating that the factory might be sold, or maybe moved to a new location. My dad quietly started looking for a new job. In late spring, my dad found a job at a mining equipment company in Carlsbad, New Mexico. We moved there over the summer, a huge change for all of us. From green Ohio farm country, we suddenly lived in a mid-sized city surrounded by desert in three directions, and mountains not far to the west. From a predominantly white Midwest state, we moved to a town that was 70% Latino. Suddenly we had to live in a world of guacamole and sopapillas, so it wasn't all bad. My dad was excited after going to an interview there, the My mom, sister, and myself were pretty hesitant, not sure what to expect.
As my dad got used to his new job, the rest of us spent a couple weeks in a hotel, and then got settled into a cool house in the hot summer Our new house was a block from the muddy Pecos River that runs through Carlsbad. The joke about the Pecos is that it was "to thick to drink, to thin to plow." But swimming in the river was a great way to deal with the scorching summer. Somehow, there were both gar and rainbow trout in that river, which is an odd combination.
As the summer began to cool into fall, my dad made friends with the guys at work. In Carlsbad, a lot of people spent their weekends doing something out in the desert. A lot of people drove four wheel drives or rode motorcycles. Spelunking, or exploring caves, was also really popular. The area is known for Carlsbad Caverns, a huge cave system and national park. Some people went shooting and camping, others looked for Indian ruins to find arrowheads or paint pictures of the old adobe walls. I turned 14 that summer, and loved going out to explore the desert on the weekends with my dad and his friends from work. It was such a different outdoor experience from wandering the woods of Ohio.
Again, this was 1980, long before Google maps, the internet, and easy ways to find cool places to explore in the desert. So many people in the area had a trick. They'd go to an obscure county government office, and buy a big book of each county, called the Soil Conservation Survey. For $4, we could get a phone book sized set of aerial maps of the whole county. Normally, these weird government documents were used by farmers, or mining engineers, to find good land to farm, or outcroppings where minerals may be found. But in Carlsbad, average people scoured these aerial photos, looking for places where there might be caves, cool places to go four-wheeling, camping, hunting, or even to find Indian ruins.
I think it was late summer that one of my dad's co-workers found something weird in the aerial maps. There are almost no trees in those thousands of square miles of desert, so pretty small things, like old buildings and ruins, showed up well. One of my dad's friends found a huge, perfect circle, about 250 yards in diameter. Inside of it was a smaller, 100 yard diameter circle, and there seemed to be a small house or cabin, right in the very center of the circles. But there were no roads, not even Jeep trails, going to the house. There nearest rough trail was over a mile away. I forget that guy's name, I'll call him Bill. Bill showed the mystery circle to the guys in the engineering department, a pretty smart group, and asked if anyone had ideas what the circle was. Everybody had thoughts, but no one was sure.
They talked about it at work for about a week, then Bill and my dad decided to drive Bill's big Chevy Blazer out there on Saturday, to find out what it was. I was asked if I wanted to go. "Heck yeah," I thought. It seemed like a cross between an archeological expedition and a Scooby-Doo mystery. I couldn't wait to get out there. Bill picked us up about 5:00 am that Saturday, hoping to get out that place in early morning, before the midday heat. We headed out of town, Bill driving, with my dad navigating, using a road map and the aerial map together. Oh yeah, there was no GPS back in those olden days, just maps. The soil conservation survey didn't label roads, so my dad had to match them up, which got harder and harder as we got out into the desert on Jeep trails. After a couple hours of wandering around, we got to a barbed wire fence that we thought was about a mile from the center of the circle.
Out in the desert, there's an unwritten rule that I learned in New Mexico, and have found holds true all over the west. The rule is about gates in fences. If a gate is open, leave it open, if it's closed, close it after you go through. The reason for this is cattle. Ranchers owned cattle that wandered all over the desert, and the gates kept the cattle in the area they were supposed to be in. You NEVER cut or drive over a fence, whether it's barbed wire, chain link, wooden, whatever. So Bill drove cross country, parallel to the fence, looking for a gate to cross to the other side. There are several types of desert gates, but most of them are just two or three strands of barbed wire, with a thick wooden post or rod on the end. The post fits through loops on the other end.
We found one of the most unusual kinds of gates, it had tall wooden posts on both sides, each about six inches in diameter. There was a high cross post, and an actual metal gate. So my dad got out, opened the gate (they're rarely locked), and Bill began to drive his big Chevy Blazer through the gate. But the gate was too narrow. Even with the rear view mirrors turned in, the Blazer was too wide to fit through the solid gate posts.
We weren't even sure this was the exact area, since we'd wandered around so much, along the maze of Jeep trails. Again, no GPS in those days to find an exact position, so we drove the rest of the way around the area, and that was the only gate. It was getting hot by that point, so we headed away, wandered a few more trails, and then headed home.
That next Monday at work, Bill and my dad told the other guys the story. One of the younger guys, named Bobbie, said he could get to the spot. They joked back and forth, and finally bet Bobbie $10 he couldn't get there. Bobbie was a former local rodeo cowboy, a motocross rider, and just a really funny character. Most notably, Bobbie stuttered, especially when he got excited or pissed off. Bobbie took the bet, and said he'd take a photo, from the little house in the middle of the mysterious circle. The mysterious desert circle was the talk of the office all week. Often the guys would scour the aerial photos during their lunch hour. A few miles away from the mysterious circle, Bill found a second set of concentric circles, again with a little cabin in the middle. My dad borrowed Bill's soil conservation book, and brought it home, and he and I tried to figure out the best way to get to the mystery circle, and looked for more. We didn't go out that weekend. But Bobbie did.
Bobbie was known for misadventures, and for telling exaggerated stories. The other guys often gave him a hard time. Then he'd get frustrated, and start to stutter, and then they'd make fun of him for stuttering. That was life in those days. Much to everyone's surprise, Bobbie walked in Monday morning with a description of the mystery circle. He told them he'd taken a photo at the little cabin, and the photo was getting developed. Bobbie drove a small, Chevy Luv pick-up, much narrower, side to side, than Bill's big Blazer. It was tight, but he cruised right through the gate, and soon found the little building. The circles were small mounds, about a foot to a foot and a half high. The little building in the center wasn't an old house or a cabin, it was just a little shack, and it didn't seem to have ever been lived in. Then he got to the crazy part. There were rusty pieces of metal scattered around. He said some of them looked like parts of bombs. The mystery circle seemed to be an old bomb target for Air Force bombers.
So the mystery suddenly became more mysterious. The closest Air Force base was the old base in Roswell, 90 miles north of Carlsbad, and maybe 100 miles from the target. But no one had ever heard of a bombing range anywhere near Carlsbad. Again, this was a time long before the internet and today's mass information society. Since I mentioned Roswell, now the UFO capitol of the world, I need to explain that no one in Carlsbad had heard of the Roswell UFO crash then. The book that made that story popular, The Roswell Incident, by Charles Berlitz, came out early the next year, in 1981. Nobody really talked about UFO's back then, except for a few really crazy people. So Roswell was known mostly for the old Air Force Base, now famous for its role in the UFO story.
The guys in my dad's office started arguing. Since Bobbie was known for tall tales, a few guys didn't believe him. By the end of the week, Bobbie got the photos back, and shut them all up. He had a couple of photos of his truck in front of the little shack. But he didn't think to pick up the metal, and since no one had heard of a bombing range, the bomb target idea was suspect.
My dad was always up for a puzzle or a mystery, so he decided we should have Bobbie take us out to the target the next weekend. My dad also went down and bought his own Soil Conservation Survey book. He started looking through it every night after work. By then 3 or 4 targets had been found. So two weeks after our first attempt, we headed out in Bobbie's little Chevy Luv pick-up, to the mystery circle. Bobbie brought one of his motorcycles along, a Honda 90 dirt bike, a good little bike for tooling around cross country in the desert. We headed out super early again, and it was light as we got to the spot. Bobbie squeaked his truck through the gate, and drove us right up to the little shack. We got out, and started looking around. Soon we found the rusty, bent scraps of metal, just a piece here, a piece there. Some looked kind of like pieces of small bombs, just like Bobbie had told the guys. I wandered one direction, my dad wandered another, and Bobbie got his motorcycle out of the truck, and putted off across the desert.
This is a standard, World War II era , 100 pound practice bomb. I pulled this photo off the web, because it gives you a good idea of the size, the light blue color (kind of rusty here), and the stenciled writing on the side. These bombs didn't explode, they just hit the ground, and often broke apart. This bomb is all metal. They were designed to be cheap, so bomber pilots and bombardiers could practice bombing before heading off to war.
Some of the rusty metal scraps looked like twisted pieces of broken oil drum or something. They were thin pieces of steel, sort of rounded, and broken by some force. Within minutes we started finding flatter pieces, parts of the square tail section of bombs, like the one in the photo above. Bobbie was right, the mystery circle appeared to be an old bombing practice range. This realization led to the obvious question: Is any of this stuff going to blow up if we touch it? That first day of looking around, we were pretty worried at first. But as we found more and more pieces of bombs, we realized these bombs weren't meant to explode.
We soon started finding big hunks of concrete, solid pieces of practice bombs, most were 10-12 inches long, and broken on impact, it seemed. We collected a few of the best pieces before it got too hot out, an took them home to check out in more detail. That first day of wandering the old bomb target led to far more questions than answers. But it provided us with something every man in New Mexico needed: a reason to go wander around the desert every weekend all winter. Let's face it, guys (and some women) just like to get outside and wander around outdoors. As a kid from Ohio, I was fascinated by jackrabbits, the huge, long eared critters that were far bigger than Ohio cottontail rabbits. We even saw pronghorn antelope now and then, off in the distance. It was just cool to get outside. I came to love exploring the wide open spaces of the desert that winter. The dry desert climate keeps man made objects in much better shape for decades, so we never knew what we would find out there.
From then on, bomb hunting was our thing. My dad and I went out with Bobbie, Bill, and my dad's boss, Ron, a couple of weekends a month, looking for practice bombs. At the time, my dad had this huge collection of military stuff. My dad was always a pack rat, as we called it then. If you've ever seen the TV show American Pickers, then you've seen those guys who collect weird stuff that Mike and Frank try to buy. My dad was one of those collectors.
A few years earlier, my dad worked with a guy who collected Nazi stuff from World War II. OK, the guy was a crazy racist, but it was an amazing collection. While my dad totally disagreed with the guy's racist ideology, it inspired him to start collecting American military stuff. As an avid target shooter, my dad went to gun shows a lot. But my mom didn't like guns. So my dad started collecting patches, uniforms, and other things from the American military forces, also found at gun shows. He never served in the military, but really got into collecting stuff. By the time we moved to New Mexico, my dad had so many things from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, that he was thinking of opening up a small museum some day. Suddenly we had stumbled onto old practice bombs, as well. So that fit right in, and we became bomb collectors.
B-17 Flying Fortress bombers dropping 100 pound bombs during World War II.
For months, over the winter of 1980-1981, we scoured the Soil Conservation Survey book's aerial photos, and ultimately found about 45 of these bomb targets scattered around the desert of south eastern New Mexico. For most of that time, we thought these targets were for the Air Force base, up at Roswell, 90 miles north of Carlsbad. On our second or third trip to that first bomb target, we found some big concrete practice bombs that were half buried. When we pulled them out of the ground, some still had the light blue color, and even stenciled writing on the bottom. Before long, we found some with dates, 1943 and 1944 mostly. So we learned the bombs were dropped during World War II.
We couldn't find any information on who dropped them. No one, even local historians in Carlsbad, had any idea. So we just assumed they were dropped from the World War II era bombers in Roswell. As the winter passed, we found a lot of concrete bombs, some nearly complete, and we found some of the tail sections in good condition, for having sat in the desert for 35 years. My dad, being an engineer, figured out that there were about 10 different variations of the metal bombs, plus the concrete ones. The metal practice bombs were filled with gravel, or sometimes sand, to give them the needed weight. When they hit, they would usually break apart from the force of landing.
My dad also figured out that they had a smoke canister in the tail, and a fuse system. So some, maybe all, of the bombs would have smoke coming out of them, so the pilots and bombardiers, or maybe a chase plane, could see how close they came to the center of the target. Piece by piece, my dad figured out the fuse mechanism on the back of the bombs, that would trigger the smoke trail. Eventually he built a full tail section with the fuse mechanism, and painted it light blue and orange, like the original ones. He still had that tail section in the early 2000's, but I think he wound up selling it at a garage sale.
A few months into this hobby of finding targets, and then driving through the desert to explore them, Bill found a really crazy target, up near Artesia, about halfway between Carlsbad and Roswell. One target of the 45 had a huge swastika built on it, so the bombers could actually bomb that huge Nazi symbol. We finally headed up there with Bill one Saturday. We left the nearest road, and went cross country, to where we thought the target should be. Since the huge circles were mounds that were only about 1 1/2 feet high, we looked out the windows for signs of the huge, 100 yard wide swastika. We came to a long, small hill, that looked like something a rancher built, maybe a watering pond for cattle. Bill drove along the 8 foot high embankment, as he and my dad scanned the desert for the target, or for practice bomb fragments.
We came to the end of the embankment, and Bill drove to the left, where there was another embankment, maybe 50 yards away. We were stumped, we were pretty sure we were in right place, but we couldn't find the target. As we drove along the second big embankment, it suddenly dawned on me. "Stop.. let me out!" I shouted. I caught Dad and Bill by surprise. Bill thought I was sick, and screeched to a halt, and jumped out of the driver's seat, so I could get out of the back seat. He didn't want me puking in his Blazer. I launched out of the Blazer, but instead of throwing up, I ran to the top of the embankment. My little insight had been right. I looked around in total amazement.
My dad and Bill looked up at me, not sure what the hell I was so excited about. "Come up here!" I yelled. They both trudged up the 8 foot high embankment... and realized that we were standing on a huge earthen mound, a 100 yard square, giant swastika mound. The only thing I could compare it to was pictures of the Great Serpent Mound, an ancient Indian mound in Ohio. I'd seen photos of that when I was a kid in Ohio, but never talked my parents into taking us there. Suddenly I was standing on a huge mound, that none of us, and apparently no one, knew existed. The thing was fucking enormous. It was so big, that when we drove up, we thought it was just the side of a pond or something. As we drove around it, it dawned on me that the big gap between hills was actually the open part of the swastika. Seriously, we were all to stoked, we felt a little like Indiana Jones. We found something no one seemed to know, or at least remember, existed.
We made a few trips to the giant swastika mound, and we found more variations of the metal practice bombs there, than anywhere. I think it was that target, which we found in early 1981, that got us more interested in actually finding out the history of the bomb targets. So our next expedition was to the Carlsbad library. My dad wandered off into the military history section, and I dove into the old issues of a magazine about New Mexico. A few hours into the library search, I found an article about a World War II era bomber and navigator training school based in Carlsbad. We also learned that the Air Force wasn't its own branch then, it was the Army Air Force during World War II. We wound up finding a couple more magazine articles that filled in some of the details. We actually talked to a local historian, a friend of one of the librarians, and she had no idea that there had been a bomber and navigator training base in Carlsbad during World War II.
Here's the patch of the Carlsbad, Army Air Force, bombardier and navigator training school, from 1943. I didn't know about this until a few years ago, when I looked it up on the internet. Now this little piece of history is on the Carlsbad Wikipedia page. So for me, this was my cool, amateur archeology-type adventure we had when I was in 9th grade. Every once and a while I'd think about it, and wonder how many other people had found the huge swastika mound in the desert. As I said above, the book The Roswell Incident, came out in early 1981. The whole UFO thing wasn't known about while we were wandering around that part of New Mexico. The supposed Roswell crash site is actually far north of Roswell, which is 45 or 50 miles north of the swastika mound. But with so many people looking for UFO's since then, I totally expected the mound to be found by someone.
Over the last few years, I tried to find it on Google Maps/Earth a few times. But I couldn't find it, and figured it had been bulldozed or something. Then, last week, when I had a little more time to spend online, I tried again. Much to my surprise, I found the huge swastika mound. It still exists! It was 3 or 4 miles from where I remembered it to be. Maybe sometime later this year I'll get back out there, with a video camera, and check it out again. That's the mound in the still, at the top of this article, as seen on Google Maps. I called this new blog Steve Emig Adventuring, because I want to spend more time telling a few old stories, like this one, and more time in the future looking into other historical things, and weird mysteries like this one.
Just to be clear, since this is a post about a huge swastika mound, I'm NOT a white supremacist. I think that whole ideology is bullshit, and I'm 100% against racism. After all, there's a reason they were dropping bombs on this symbol during World War II, the Nazi's were the bad guys, and still are. But this practice bomb target was the most elaborate one of the 45 or so we found. That's why I featured it in this post.
