Burning Man Zero Seven Homepage
The Story of TMA-3
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Introduction
This is the story of TMA-3, how it came to be and what was really behind it. Since on-line reading is more like channel surfing than reading a book, I am providing a table of contents with links to each chapter. The reason is simple: your time is valuable and I’d much rather you read the parts you are interested in rather than getting bored too soon and not “finish the book”. You find what you like and if it perks your interest, you’ll know where you want to go next.
author's note: All accounts in this story are true.
9/27/09
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CONTENTS
Part II The Real Story behind TMA-3
Chapter 6 Who Created the Creator?
Chapter 7 The Spook Highway & CE3K
Part III Burning Man – Why We Do It and What We See
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Another monolith has been discovered . . .
Everyone, from the baffled Black Rock City Ranger stopping my car in the middle of the playa to the puzzled burners looking inquisitively at the odd arrangement of vintage FM radios and frequency analyzers, had the same question:
“Uh… what’s TMA-3?”
Below is the description, as it appeared on the Burning Man Website:
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Scenario:
Aug 24, 2009
Another monolith has mysteriously appeared in the Black Rock Desert. Its purpose is unknown. A team has been assembled to investigate an RF field that appears to be emanating from within the structure. The site has been designated TMA-3.
Aug. 31, 2009
The monolithic structure, standing 12 ft above the desert playa, is cordoned off by a perimeter of yellow caution tape. Within the perimeter, participants and members of the TMA-3 team are working at a small workstation monitoring the transmission. The RF signal has been deciphered and TMA-3 is now sending its message to the playa and beyond. The message appears to be of human voices enumerating the human DNA sequence. It is believed this message is announcing that the human race has unlocked the secrets of the human genome – another possible advancement in the evolution of the human race.
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TMA stands for Tycho Magnetic Anomaly and was the name given to the black monolith that was discovered on the moon in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Tycho is the name of the crater it was found in and Magnetic Anomaly refers to the electromagnetic field that was emanating from within the structure. When a human touched TMA-1 for the first time, it began to transmit a signal which was heard in the movie as a high pitched tone. This signal was a beacon being transmitted toward the heavens announcing that the human race had located the monolith, thereby revealing that we had reached that point in our evolution.
The Tycho monolith was referred to as TMA-1. The second monolith, designated TMA-2, was discovered in orbit around the planet Jupiter. The monolith seen in the beginning of the movie with the apes was designated TMA-0 as it was not discovered until long after TMA-1 on the continent of Africa but was the very first monolith encountered by early man, (the apes).
TMA-3, in our story, is the next monolith whose purpose, like TMA-1, is to announce that we have achieved the next advancement in our evolution – in this case, the unlocking of the human genome.
(from the facebook Burning Man page)
Welcome to the official Burning Man Page. Please keep the content here in accord with Burning Man's 10 Principles.
Founded: 1986
The posting on Facebook's Burning Man blog by a biology student in Victoria, B.C. caught my eye because of one word - “transmit”. I had finally committed myself to attend Burning Man 2009 only 2 months earlier and was not planning on creating an artwork or volunteering for the Black Rock City Emergency Services as I did in 2007. I was just reading the discussion threads to see what kinds of things Burners were talking about this year. I’m a ham radio enthusiast and my trip to BRC in 2007 involved my setting up a special event station at the corner of 7:30 and Kelp Forest complete with a myriad of whiz-bang radio electronics gear.
So when I saw the word “transmit”, I read a little closer. The college student, Mitch Brost, had an idea. He was interested in creating some sort of artwork, maybe something that might resemble a double-helix, which would transmit a recording of voices reading off the amino acids that make up human mitochondria DNA. He was wondering if anyone knew how this audio could be transmitted.
I couldn’t resist.
Several emails later, I’m suggesting a way to work a radio transmission of the DNA sequence into the “Evolution” theme of Burning Man 2009. Why the monolith came to my mind as the vehicle from which to transmit the signal, I would not realize until a few weeks before Burning Man. The plan was to build a 12 ft high monolith, plant it on the playa, and have a workstation about 30 ft away monitoring a signal that was being sent by it. The workstation would become the “interactive” part of the artwork by allowing participants to dial up and locate the transmissions on vintage radio receivers built into the workstation. I would build the workstation and Mitch and his friends in Victoria would build the Monolith.
It didn’t quite work that way.
A collaborative effort
Any good planner always has a contingency plan. And Mitch had enough foresight to give me a heads-up that there was a 50/50 chance the monolith might not get built. So it came as no surprise to me when I found out 30 days before the event that the monolith crew, (for those good ol’ hair-pulling reasons you read about of other art planners running into last minute snags), were not going to be able to produce a monolith. Fortunately I had a “plan B” ready to put into action.
When the first publication of the Black Rock art installations list for 2009 was released on the BM website in June, I had noticed that one of the installations was titled “Monolith 2.0”. I had wondered from the outset whether or not there would be another monolith design out on the playa. Sure enough, there was. So, with my tail between my legs and a modest helping of humble pie, I contacted the builder of Monolith 2.0 and explained my situation. Without changing the design and purpose of his artwork, I explained, I would like to use his monolith as the monolith in my scenario. His monolith would remain at 2:15, 1,000 feet from the Man and my monitoring station would remain at 10:00, 1,200 feet from the man. The only change to my scenario is that I would add a beam antenna to the site and point it at his monolith to receive the signal that would now be emanating from his monolith ¼ mile away.
On Monday, August 31, opening day of Burning Man 2009, Monolith 2.0 was up and operating. Monolith 2.0’s interaction allowed participants to produce tonal creations using digital keypads on the front of the monolith. These tonal creations could be heard through amplified speakers on the surface of the monolith. Additionally TMA-3 and Monolith 2.0 expanded that interactivity by placing a transmitter and antenna inside the monolith, allowing the tonal creations and the TMA-3 DNA sequence transmission to be monitored at the TMA-3 site as well as on FM radios throughout Black Rock City.
“t-g-t-c-c-c-a-a-t-c-a-t-t-g-t-c-a-c-c-t-g-g-a-c-a-c-g-a-t-t-g-c-a-t-t-a-c-a-g-g-c-c-t-g-c-a-a-a-t-c-g-a-g-c-c”
On Wednesday, September 2, the construction of the TMA-3 site was completed and by Friday night, September 4, both signals by TMA-3 and Monolith 2.0, (the mitochondria DNA sequence from TMA-3 and the tonal creations from Monolith 2.0), were being transmitted across the playa.
Now, the joke was, (as I explained to the art folks in my application for TMA-3), that on Friday night the Mothership, having received the TMA-3 transmission, would appear in the sky over the playa and as the bottom of the ship opened up, out would come hundreds of ecstatic aliens yelling, “Where’s the party?!”
Well, that didn’t happen.
What did happen is the real story of TMA-3.
Part II - The Real Story behind TMA-3
The words any elementary student loves to hear, “free draw time,” was announced by my 4th grade teacher. “You can draw anything that you want,” she said as she passed out a pencil and one sheet of manila drawing paper to each student.
This was a ticket to paradise for me since the only thing I ever excelled at in grade school was day dreaming. I wasn’t much of an artist and I didn’t spend a lot of time drawing pictures of stick figures standing next to their house with the big tree and a yellow sun. But why I started to draw what I did has puzzled me my whole life. In fact I kept the pencil drawing in my boxes of stuff for many, many years and on occasion I would pull it out and give it a glance. It never surprised me that I would want to draw what I did; I just never knew where the idea came from.
The drawing started with a box, pretty much a simple two-dimensional rectangle. On top of it I drew a dish type antenna, (very crude), which is odd because what is a 9 year old boy, who spends his after school time running around the orange groves with his dog, going to know about satellite antennas. (Not to mention that in 1964 satellite dishes were just not that prevalent). I guess I was going for a certain effect because I added dimensional notations to the sides in inches which, even as I was drawing it, I figured they probably didn’t add up right. At the top of the page I gave it the title, “Sun Project”, and below the box I wrote something that has stuck with me my whole life: 101-5B7. That was it – simple, crude, and probably a by-product of watching too many sci-fi cartoons. But ‘one-zero-one-dash-five-bee-seven’ has always been in my head as long as I can remember. I never gave it much thought other than, “I come up with the weirdest things.”
Chapter 5 – All of those Stars
the dilemma of infinity
So there I was, at the age of fifteen, the pinnacle of pubescent turmoil, lying on my back in the grass. It was night and I was staring up at the dark New England sky beholding the thousands upon millions of stars. I had always enjoyed challenging the concept of infinity – that things just go on and on without a finite end. But this particular night I really wanted to comprehend just how deep that was. With each star I could see, I looked for a more distant star beyond it, (like I could really make out any depth at all among the billions of stars spread across the black canvas of the night sky.) But I wasn’t content with just thinking about how far into space my mind could comprehend, I wanted to use that part of my brain, (or my soul… I have no idea what the difference is), to actually feel myself in the far reaches of space. I wanted to know what it feels like to be at infinity’s doorstep and then make myself realize that that perception is only scratching the surface of how large the universe really is. I literally got intoxicated by doing this further and further such that when I thought I had traveled as far as I could, I would experience the shocking awareness that I would always only be halfway there forever and infinitely. And then I felt the G’s give way under my back as though I was in a freefall.
Now this would be all good and well if I was a 15 year old experiencing my first high on marijuana, but I wasn’t. I was awake and as nimble and sober as a 15 year old could be.
It kind of put the bug in me.
Chapter 6 - Who Created the Creator?
I used to have a saying that my ex-wife really hated because she was a devoted church-goer and I am an agnostic. We’d be up late on a weekend night playing poker and I’d finally win a poker hand. Then, with a grin on my plastered face, I’d sit back, take a drag off my cigarette, and ask, “Alright then, who created the Creator?” She just hated that because she knew I knew she didn't have an answer but worse, that I was dead serious. It goes something like this… Okay, so if you have a creator of the universe and he (or she, or whatever) has created everything that exists, how the heck was he, she, or it created? Simple question. It’s like the dilemma of infinity. If you want to say that something is finite and you can’t get to anything beyond that, then you are still stuck with explaining the void beyond nothingness. It’s probably futile trying to figure it out because you are applying human concepts to something which, I guarantee, is way beyond human.
But I have fun toying with it. I call it my Mobius loop, the dilemma of infinity. And who would have guessed that when I reached the breakout age of 18 someone would come along with a space movie that climaxes in a scene titled “Infinity and Beyond”.
The first time I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, I really doubt if I followed much of it at all. But you could sit me down in front of a movie of a 45 minute zoom from one end of a room to the other, (Michael Snow’s “Wavelength”) and I was thoroughly entertained. So when I found out in college that film was something you could legitimately study, I changed my major to film and started researching 2001: A Space Odyssey. And you know the expression “I’ve watched that film a hundred times”? Yep. Easily. I read the books, the reviews, the interviews, the critiques, and never stopped watching the black & white video-taped copy we had of the movie in the screening room, (you mean you can see this in color?!)
I only mention all this because there has been a certain draw I have had toward certain movies, most notably, 2001, 2010, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, and Contact .
Each one of these movies had something to do with listening to or watching the heavens for some unknown reason. Well, a theologian or a psychiatrist would have a field day with this and say, “Obviously, he’s an agnostic - he’s searching for God.”
Okay. Fine. Whatever.
The bug in me has not been that I should be searching for God, but that there is something that I need to do to make a contact happen; regardless of who or what it is I am trying to make contact with. There is a point in time, a place, and I need to be there. I just haven’t a clue as to what or where it is.
But this isn’t a dilemma that I alone experience. Too many sci-fi stories and movies have been made about this yearning, this desire to make contact with something much bigger than ourselves. So the shrinks are probably right, we just have to buck up and get with the program – believe in God.
Okay.
Fine.
Whatever.
Chapter 7 – The Spook Highway & CE3K
Photos from the 1978 trip
No surprise that the route I take to Burning Man (from southern California) is by way of Highway 95 in Nevada, nicknamed the “Spook Highway” because of the classified military installations scattered throughout the barren wasteland. This drive to Burning Man is for me as exciting as the Burning Man event itself.
I have always had a strong urge to travel the remote highways of Nevada with no objective in mind other than to see what I could find. My first experience was in the summer of 1978 when I graduated from college and drove west from my hometown in Granville, Ohio to Hollywood by way of Oregon. I selected the route that would take me through the most deserted place on the map I could find, which at that time turned out to be Hwy 140 that drove northwest past Continental Lake and up through no man’s land into Oregon. Behind the driver’s seat I had packed some items – a camera and a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder. When my girlfriend Kathy, who made the trip with me, asked me what I was going to do with it and why we were driving out into the middle of nowhere, I answered, “Because if I encounter a UFO, I want to document it.” She mumbled, “Uh… okay,” and went back to sleep. She always knew I was a little crazy.
Little did I know that almost 30 years later I would be traveling through that same desert in search of my holy Mecca - a 2-mile diameter city of 47,000 people camped out on the dry lakebed of the Black Rock Desert.
When Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out I was in awe. I’m a film graduate and though I knew it was pure Hollywood whiz-bang entertainment tugging at the heart strings of UFO enthusiasts, I was drawn by the underlying theme of the movie – someone out there is trying to contact us. Then I saw the movie Contact and that nailed the lid on the coffin. Radio – you can send messages through space by radio! If someone was trying to contact me or if I was going to contact them, it would have to be by radio. But I couldn’t afford an array of 5-story high dish antennas like the VLA in Socorro, New Mexico or the mammoth dish antenna carved into the hillside in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. If I had any chance of being heard, it was going to have to be with what I had – a lot of junk, my bells and whistles I call it.
So over the years I have tweaked my ham radio skills and placed myself in remote locations, perched myself on mountain tops, and even secured permission to transmit from selected military installations. All this, in the hope of bettering the chance that I might someday hear or be heard by someone beyond the confines of this world.
One month prior to Burning Man 2009, I had to submit my frequency request for transmitting TMA-3’s signal on the playa. The frequency plan is coordinated by the burners that annually utilize very low power FM transmitters to broadcast their music programs or material relating to their artwork. Okay then, what frequency do I want to use? Is there any number between 86 and 108 MHz that has any personal significance to me or the TMA-3 art installation? Hmmm. The first number that came to my mind was 1-0-1-5-B-7. I thought about the picture I drew as a boy of the rectangular box with the dish antenna on top. And, I tried to make some sense out of the numbers and the letter. Then, figuring it out, I pretty much just said in astonishment, “What the fuck?!”
101.5 was the frequency and B7 is an emissions designator the FCC uses for a 2-channel amplitude modulated signal – (okay, so I used a 2 channel stereo frequency modulated signal. The Gods can shoot me.)
What did you expect?
Friday night on the playa came and went. And though the TMA-3 signal had been transmitting steadily throughout the night and on through the following morning, the Mothership never did arrive and the only thing that resembled a hundred ecstatic aliens were the hundreds of free-spirited participants adorned in their colored lights, reveling across the desert playa known as Burners.
But Saturday morning, as the sun was beginning to rise over the desert mountains and the grey playa dust that settled in the still air was beginning to take on color, I stepped out of my trailer and looked up. The sky was a gorgeous blue and, for the most part, was clear - except for something very, very big that loomed overhead. I grabbed my camera and as I headed out onto the playa in my car toward the TMA-3 site, I turned on the radio and tuned to Burning Man Information Radio. A female DJ was remarking how she had just come in from outside and saw the most incredible thing up in the sky.
“I can only describe it,” she said, “as a big orange slug”.
Now, I’m sure meteorologists have a name for this terrific weather phenomenon. It was probably about 5 miles long and just loomed there by itself above Black Rock City with no other clouds around it. And when the light caught it right, you could make out a large circular vortex on the underside of it, almost like a portal or a womb for this gigantic slug thing, whatever it was.
To me, there was no doubt in my mind what it was. It was my Mothership.
She had heard my signal.
So what did I expect to see? What do I ever expect to see if someday I finally encounter something I have been waiting for most of my life? Will I see a glitzy larger-than-life spaceship like something out of a Stephen Spielberg movie or will I not even recognize it when I see it?
If I ever do find God, will it look like a bearded man in a flowing white robe, or will I just become aware that whatever it is I am looking at has given me the inspiration I needed to realize I have finally found what I have been looking for?
The big orange slug did not open her portal and I wasn’t invited aboard and whisked away to another universe. I didn’t hear any subconscious messages and there was no 5-note tonal discourse like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The cloud just loomed there for about a half hour and eventually dissipated into the horizon.
Many of us Burners are drawn to the annual Burning Man Festival for our own personal reasons. And what we see in each piece of art and in the faces of the participants on the playa is a unique and different experience for each of us. The cloud that appeared over Black Rock City was, for me, my Mothership. But for others it was most likely a thousand other things. Burning Man is what you bring to the playa and what you see when you get there. And that big orange slug in the sky was one of the greatest works of art I have ever seen.
Part III - Burning Man – Why We Do It and What We See
If there is one thing I love about America it is that we have the freedom to follow our dreams, and become whoever we want to be. And if there is one question that is asked more often of a Burner than anything else, it is “why do you do it?”
Books have been written in answer to this question and films have been made to try to convey in images, what words cannot describe. The answer is more often than not different for everyone. For some it is the freedom, for others it is the exercise in self reliance. For me it is the size of the thing.
If you have ever wondered what would happen if 50,000 people were allowed to come together in the middle of one of the most remote and deserted places in the country, govern themselves while promoting radical self-expression, self-reliance, and a zero-tolerance for commercialism, Black Rock City would be the answer. And Burning Man has demonstrated throughout the 20 years we have been doing this, that we can continue to leave no trace behind.
For some the draw is the night time spectacle of larger-than-life artwork spewing jets of flame hundreds of feet into the air, or the thunderous roll of music amplified across the desert playa 24/7 that, after being in Black Rock City for 24 hours, sounds like the rhythmic, non-stop droll of a locomotive traveling endlessly across the desert lakebed.
For some it is the freedom to express yourself, or even the freedom to meditate in your own universe. And of course for most of us it is the world’s biggest party. But for all of us it is most certainly the love, the respect, and the tolerance we show for each other, regardless of whom we are and what our dreams may be.
Burning Man is a dream of how I wish the world was. It is all those things I was brought up to believe were not really possible, except in my imagination. I came to Burning Man this year looking for something very imaginary and what I found was something very real. Whatever the hell it was.
After 40+ years of keeping my eyes peeled to the sky, I have never seen a UFO. At least not what most people would think of as a UFO. But I did see something once and the memory of what I saw has lingered in my mind ever since just as the number 101-5B7 always has.
It occurred late one night in 1997 off the coast of San Clemente Island, 70 miles offshore southern California. I was in the Navy aboard a helicopter carrier, it was almost midnight and I had just gotten off watch in the Joint Intelligence Center. I wanted a breath of fresh air and did something you aren’t supposed to do on certain Navy ships at night, especially carriers – I stepped out of the hatch onto the weather deck and looked at the ocean surface dimly illuminated by a half moon. Flight operations were being conducted by some other ships and a few aircraft could be heard flying somewhere out in the darkness.
With my mind on nothing in particular, I noticed a light of some sort up above me. Because I wasn’t looking directly at it, in the back of my mind I was thinking it was one of the aircraft. But as I looked up, I was surprised to see that there was nothing there except a very small thin cloud with two colors, blue and red still illuminating it. There was what I can only describe as a few electrical arcs that briefly appeared within the cloud and then all to be seen was the small pale cloud dimly illuminated by the moon.
I’ve always felt the only thing that would make sense was heat lightning. There were no aircraft where I was looking and there was no sound heard from the arcs of light.
But my instinct tells me it was something else, something unidentified.
It is not surprising that 12 years later I am now working at the Southern California Offshore Test Range (SCORE) on San Clemente Island nor is it any wonder that I have my radio gear in my room and my whiz-bang antennas atop the roof of the trailer I live in. I am still listening and every now and then I am still transmitting.
E.T. phone home.
the following galleries are forthcoming:
~ The TMA-3 Audio Transmission
~ The Mothership Photos
~ The Temple Burn
~ Monolith 2.0
~ The Workstation
(Mitch's facebook avatar)
