Green Bank is a small town in West Virginia with a population of just 141. It’s an innocuous little place, situated in the peaceful woodlands and rolling hills of Pocahontas County, approximately a four-hour drive inland from Washington, D.C.
It is also home to a giant telescope. Standing nearly 500 feet tall, the structure not only provides invaluable knowledge of our galaxy, but means that Green Bank falls in a ‘National Radio Quiet Zone’, leaving it one of the only places in America still free of the modern digital world.
While it might seem unimaginable to navigate your daily life without a phone or roaming internet these days, this is increasingly becoming the pull of living in Green Bank, West Virginia, rather than a deterrent. Gone is the noise and distraction that comes with electric devices on our person at all times, and instead is the peace and tranquility of a disconnected town in a beautiful corner of the United States.
The world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope is the reason for the digital blackout. Dating back to the mid-20th century and housed at the Green Bank Observatory, it is called the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, or GBT for short. Locals in the area often refer to it as the Great Big Thing for short.
The GBT is incredibly sensitive to even the smallest of radio pulses, able to detect ones transmitting from space. This means, however, that transmissions from far closer to home can disturb the machine. Any airwaves need to be regulated and authorities therefore established the National Radio Quiet Zone. Measuring a total of 13,000 square miles of remote land, across the borders of West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland, it was set up by the Federal Communications Commission in the 1950s.
The discoveries at the observatory and via the GBT have been crucial in our understanding of the Milky Way.
Since its founding, it has discovered interstellar molecules, the first pulsar in a supernova remnant, the radio source at the center of the Milky Way, and located our galaxy in a supercluster of galaxies measuring 500 million light-years in diameter, with a mass of 100 million billion suns.”
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If that wasn’t enough, Green Bank recently calculated a hydrogen cloud currently hurtling towards the Milky Way at 150 miles a second, predicted to crash into our galaxy in about 30 million years. It was also the site of the first systematic search for extraterrestrial civilization.
It’s a fascinating contradiction between one of the most advanced research centers on the planet (and quite possibly far beyond), and a quiet town where you’re not even allowed to use your mobile phone.
By this point, anybody still living and working in the town is doing it deliberately. As Michael Holstine, the observatory’s business manager, puts it: “If you work in Green Bank, it’s because you want this kind of life.”
Increasingly, residents of Green Bank are not just people looking to escape the intensity of modern technology. There is also a growing group of so-called “wireless refugees” who have moved to the town in recent years. They say they suffer from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity, or EHS, and can only find refuge in Green Bank’s unique disconnect.
In 2013, the WUSA network went and met some of these early wireless refugees. “To come to Green Bank, it’s leaving the shopping malls, the theaters, the cultural events. Here, I don’t have my family, I don’t have my friends. But at least now I have some hope and a future,” Diane Schou, a Green Bank resident, told them.
They discovered dozens of people who came from all over North America and were leaving their more conventional jobs behind. From a police officer in Toronto, to an artist in California, to a Hawaiian architect, the Green Bank population was filled with people who had traveled far and wide to escape electromagnetic waves.
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“My face turns red, I get a headache, my vision changes, and it hurts to think. Last time [I was exposed] I started getting chest pains – and to me that’s becoming life-threatening,” Schou said of her symptoms. “It’s horrible when something is emitting and your body is having reactions,” she continued.
“It’s not perfect here, but it’s the only place in the world I know that’s protected where people live,” said Schou.
A World Health Organization (WHO) ruling in 2011 said: “There is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to electromagnetic field exposure.”
Bob Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, said: “There’s not only no science, there’s science showing that there’s no science.”
That doesn’t mean there aren’t still perks to being here. Karen O’Neill, the GBT site director, said: “When I watch a soccer game, every parent on that field is watching the kids playing soccer, nobody is looking at their cell phone, no one is worrying about that.”
“You really don’t see that struggle with the parents here where they talk to their kids and say, ‘You’ve got to put the phones away,’ and the kids go, ‘Do I have to?’ and they’re sneaking them under the table and doing everything they can to text their friends,” she continued. “We do have broadband internet at our homes. We can access the internet the same as anyone – the difference is that when I leave my desk the internet doesn’t follow me.”
