An abandoned military base of the LORAN system in the middle of the Mojave Desert
During World War II, the United States developed a hyperbolic radio navigation system for ships and aircraft.
The system was called Long Range Navigation (LORAN), and was initially used by convoys of merchant ships escorted by warships crossing the Atlantic Ocean to bring supplies to Europe, and later by long-range patrol aircraft, used for anti-submarine surveillance missions and search and rescue duties. Both the Navy and Air Force developed more accurate versions of LORAN after World War II, as the initial versions were only accurate to within a few miles.
In 1958, the U.S. Coast Guard (a service branch of the U.S. Armed Forces) took over the LORAN stations, but their use began to decline in the 1960s in favor of more modern navigation systems. LORAN was discontinued in the United States in 2010, when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security decommissioned the remaining LORAN-C stations (a variant introduced in 1957) because they were rendered obsolete by GPS and to save funds.
One such Coast Guard station was the LORAN-C Searchlight, built in 1976 near the town of Searchlight, Nevada, in the middle of the Mojave Desert. This station was decommissioned on February 8, 2010, and its four transmission towers were demolished. Last year, Uncanny Expeditions explored this site, showing it in an interesting video:
You can see some screenshots from this video here. The base was in the middle of the desert, in a sparsely populated area. The nearest facility is a power plant located one kilometer to the northwest.
One of the buildings on the base. The wall has very visible marks of gunshots. In the video you can see that there are also marks of gunshots on the doors and in other places.
A lonely basketball hoop. It was probably one of the few entertainments that the seven members of the Coast Guard (two of them reservists) who were stationed at this base had.
One of the base's generators. Both the generators and other elements of the old base have been looted.
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