Residents of tiny Nevada town frightened by helicopter exercises

Tuesday, June 8, 1999 | 10:28 a.m.

Goldfield is on the edge of the Tonopah Test Range, where some aircraft such as the F-117A Stealth fighter have been tested. The test range is the northern section of the 3-million-acre Nellis Air Force Range.

"We don't know why they were hanging around Goldfield," said Nellis spokesman Mike Estrada.

Many of the 450 residents in this Esmeralda County town, 186 miles northwest of Las Vegas, were awakened by the ruckus.

"Those guys scare the hell out of this town last night," Justice of the Peace Juanita Colvin told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Another resident, Virginia Ridgway, said she thought "it was an airliner coming down."

"It was so loud. It was right over the house, and then I thought a helicopter was going to crash on the house. It sounded like something big and heavy and loud. I thought, 'Oh well, I'm 66. That's it,' " Ridgway said.

One of the helicopters landed at the town's airstrip.

For Ridgway, being buzzed by helicopters was yet another encounter with government aircraft, from jets that seemed as if they were going to fly into her car's tailpipe as she was driving down the road to an off-course rocket that was launched from the Nevada Test Site in October 1997.

The 34-foot-long, $2 million experimental rocket from Sandia National Laboratories "went right over the house," she said, before it crashed and burned on public lands about 10 miles from Goldfield.

"They should be staying the hell on the range and leaving us alone," Ridgway said. "They've got more land than they need out there. They don't need to be scaring citizens in the middle of the night."

Estrada described the craft involved in Sunday night's incident as dual-rotor CH-47 Chinook cargo-transport helicopters. He said they were probably Army or Marine craft connect to the Air Force Special Operation Command, a multi-service organization based in Hurlburt, Fla.

"They could have been from anywhere," Estrada said.