Valley has keyless encounters of the weird kind
By Juliet V. Casey, J.M. Kalil and Keith Rogers, Las Vegas 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.

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.

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.

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."

posted by awiggins | 03:49 PM