Look! Up In The Sky!

    I'm pretty sure most of you remember the
opening lines on the old Superman show. The
television and, before that, the radio version
opened with a bunch of people looking skyward
and saying..."Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird.
It's a plane. It's Superman!
     Well a Facebook message from an old
friend got me to thinking back to the days when
I spent a lot of my time looking up in the sky!
      No. I wasn't searching for Superman!
      I was a volunteer with an organization
called "The Ground Observer Corps."  (In
spite of that name we watched the sky not the
ground!)
      The Corps was a volunteer arm of the Air
Force.
       The time was the mid and late 1950's when
we were still very involved with the "Cold War."
       They were building a Radar line across
Canada to give us an early warning if Russian
planes ever tried to sneak through to hit targets
in the United States.
        But until that radar line was ready they
needed people to watch the sky for planes that
might be going somewhere they shouldn't.
        That's where we came in!
        We took shifts in posts throughout the
country (mine was in Hazleton) that looked
like little Airport Control Towers.
        When we saw a plane passing overhead
we dialed the Operator and simply said
"Aircraft Flash." She put us through to a
Control center where people would take our
information, compare it with data received
from the previous nearby post, and plot the
flight of airplanes over Pennsylvania!
         We never saw any "enemy aircraft"
(as far as I know) although a few posts were
said to have issued the first reports of UFO's
in our area! I never got to see any of them
either! We did have a few "strange"
volunteers!
        I'm also not sure if they ever scrambled
any jet fighters on my account!!!!!
        I earned my "wings" after 25 hours of
service and racked up enough time for my
250 hour Medal by the time I stopped looking
up!
       They disbanded the Ground Observer
Corps in 1958 when all those radar sites were
put into service.
        There's very few people who remember
the Corps these days. But at its height there
were 750,000 volunteers at 16,000 posts
throughout the country!
         Every now and then when I'm looking
at a beautiful sky I remember those days when
we did out little part to help keep people safe.
        I'm just sorry I never caught site of
either Superman or one of those UFO's.
       Although the Corps is gone, I keep
looking!
       Hope I spot one or the other and that
all your NEWS is good!