New Mexico has a mystery city...
July 22, 2015 1:08 PM   Subscribe

 
This is especially interesting to me, as I live in Los Alamos. It can be a rather odd town, but it's a great place to live if you like the outdoors.
posted by Uncle Grumpy at 2:52 PM on July 22, 2015


I'm honestly amazed that story made it to print back in '44. That said, hokey-smokes!!!, that was some crappy writing. Like watching a comic trying way too hard to save themselves from bombing.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:56 PM on July 22, 2015


Another person realized something big was going on in Los Alamos purely from circumstantial evidence. From the Reddit thread:

An amusing anecdote is that the editor of a major science fiction magazine realized something was up when so many of his clients switched their forwarding addresses to a P.O. Box in tiny Los Alamos.
posted by honestcoyote at 2:57 PM on July 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


If you're ever in Los Alamos, the Historical Museum is worth a visit. The bigger and fancier Bradbury Science Museum gets most of the visits; it's funded by LANL and is quite good, but is far too much "our friend, the atom bomb" propaganda for my tastes. The historical museum does a great job of conveying the weirdness that was the town of Los Alamos during the war, what it was like to live there. Great stuff.
posted by Nelson at 5:21 PM on July 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


An amusing anecdote is that the editor of a major science fiction magazine realized something was up when so many of his clients switched their forwarding addresses to a P.O. Box in tiny Los Alamos.
posted by honestcoyote

Actually the PO box was in Santa Fe. P.O. Box 1663.
posted by Uncle Grumpy at 6:26 PM on July 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Richard Feynman was part of the Project. When they were setting off, he and the other physicists were told to buy tickets past Los Alamos and leave the train early, so that there wouldn't be a suspiciously high number of people buying tickets to the same small town. Feynman thought "well, if that's what they're all doing, it's safe for me to buy a ticket to Los Alamos" and that's what he did. When he got to the station the woman at the counter said "Oh, so you're the one all the luggage is for!" Everybody had been dispatching their luggage to Los Alamos, but the railroad hadn't sold any tickets there ...
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:21 PM on July 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


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