There were eight of us at the time. Usually we just met in the evenings and hung out, doing whatever, but then came an idea, maybe we should pull off a practical joke or two. Thus started “Project Insomnia”, a group of night crawlers with nothing better to do than think up some mischief.

The grandest plan we never pulled off was “Operation Project Insomnia”. This was back in my college days of course when everyone was thinking big. It was also a time when the crop circles came back into favor as a rash of new circles showed up in England. So the public consciousness was already seeded with the ideas of aliens and UFO’s. So, what could my friends and I do to have a little fun with this?

So we started throwing ideas around, what would be a good practical joke. Well obviously it had to be big and public. It had to catch the public’s interest immediately and stir up all the wrong kind of attention. I threw out the idea of a UFO hoax and that got everyone’s attention.

With the idea in hand we had to come up with the steps to make it all work, it had to be believable or at the least not easily seen through. We came up with the following steps to implement to pull off the hoax.

First would have to be the UFO itself. Not only did we have to create a UFO for the public see, we wanted it to show up in radar. Next it had to be big, really big. Then there had to be lights and of course it had to move. What else could we do but a huge Mylar balloon. Tests with large pieces of Mylar proved we could create large “air tight” balloons without too much trouble. Then we rigged the lights, a couple of Christmas lights and a few AA batteries, and attached an RC unit to turn them on once in the air. Nylon fishing line was rigged to the balloon to control assent and the fast decent. The test looked great, I wish I had the photo’s to post here, hell, even in daylight it could have fooled people.

Next, the landing site: research showed a classic landing site was composed of “Burn” marks and other “impressions” (supposedly of landing struts). Then there was the real kicker, a radiological signature. To solve the first problem we were going to rent heated air blowers from U-haul. If it did not burn but really dried out a “spot” then it would be good enough for the hoax. (Of course we planned three burns.) Of course the other “imprints” are simple, it was the radiological element that would be the kicker.

Did you know that most smoke detectors have an ionization chamber and a small disk of radioactive material? Well they do, about .5 grams of Americium 241 embedded in a gold matrix. Hit up your Geiger Counter and point it at yours… hear that extra clicking, yeah, radiation. It is small and mostly concealed in the Ionization chamber, but it is there. The question, could we handle it safely? Well turns out that these disks emit about 1 micro curie, or 1/100 of a millirem of radiation. Nothing dangerous, in fact your microwave is more dangerous. But that does not mean that it is not detectable. Excited Alpha particles and the occasional beta particle can play buggers with detectors!

Third was the “emergency” transmission as the UFO was coming in for a crash landing. So, how do we pull that one off? Oh, so simple. First we would come up with a code, but instead of using binary, we would base the code on tertiary language. 0 was represented as a lower sideband pulse, 1 was neutral modulation pulse, and 2 was an upper sideband pulse.  We created a faked up language, but left the numeric equivalents of the language as very simple tertiary symbols. Re-allocated “earth coordinated to equate 0 longitude to the middle of the Pacific Ocean, not Greenwich, the idea being the center of Pacific would allow for a cleaner map and no land masses would be intersected. Think about it, a well ordered way to map a planet. Latitudes and longitudes were divided up into base 9 units, where each degree was about 1.2 new degrees (the math is a pain here). We actually worked up the code… it was cool. We then programmed it into an IBM for recording. Wow. Sounded cool and was recognizable as a digital transmission on the AM bands.

Do you know what you get with a 10 watt AM transmitter and the US rail system? You get a transmission that is heard ALL over the country if not beyond. Guess what we were going to hook our transmitter to. Interestingly enough, this was the most illegal part of the hoax. Let’s say the FCC is not very forgiving.

There you have it… the essence of Operation Project Insomnia, the best gag me and my friends never pulled. We had it all worked out so that if the FBI or whoever were to follow all the leads they would have ended up in a small abandoned shack outside of Scottsdale Arizona with the key to the whole hoax and picture with “Project Insomnia” in our uniforms and faces all conveniently eliminated.

It had everything, public sightings, caught on radar, a mysterious transmission sliding around the middle bands, and physical evidence. We thought maybe to even let the cat out of the bag on Letterman or something. It was a fun thought.