re: #104 Varek Raith

Good early morning.
I’m up because a, no joke, unmarked, light less helicopter is flying around.

re: #106 freetoken

Eh? You’ve gone over to the Black Helicopter crowd?

I live a few hundred yards from the NJ Turnpike (insert “What exit?” joke here). There’s enough houses and trees, as well as 40 foot cement barrier, to make it barely noticeable.

I was awakened one night at about 3 or 3:30 to a helicopter methodically buzzing overhead. It was just low enough that it got my attention. Looking out the window, the copter was using its fairly powerful searchlight to try to track something or someone down.

It seemed to be hewing fairly close to the Turnpike, but would stray from that path every so often to basically flood the surrounding housing developments with a blanket of light.

I can only guess at the candlepower of this thing; it was lighting up the neighborhood like a mini sun. At one point, it hit our yard and essentially transformed it into high noon. I’m fairly sure the pilot could see me staring up at him.

My curiosity was peaked at this point. This was extremely out-of-the-ordinary for around here. I turned on KYW 1060, the 24-hour news station, to see if there was some clue as to why the copter was hanging out here.

Eventually, the traffic report came and mentioned that the NJ Turnpike was closed from Exit 1 to Exit 4. I’m roughly 5 miles from Exit 4. Exit 1 is the beginning of the Turnpike as you leave Delaware.

For you non-Jerseyites, that’s almost 40 miles of one of the nation’s busiest highways, shut down in both directions. What was stunning was there was no explanation; none. Just “Hey, you know that world-famous roadway that sees tons of traffic even at 3AM? It’s off-limits. No biggie.”

The next morning, I could not find any reference to the closure in the news at all. The lack of any sort of news item was weird. I figured if there was some major accident, the local press would be in Full Metal “If it bleeds, it leads” mode.

To this day, part of me thinks there was some sort of Jack Bauer-style DHS terrorism operation that went down. Either that, or it was the world’s most expensive lost key search ever.