[CPEO-MEF] See No Evil

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Either the feds are too inept, or they just don't want to know what 
roils beneathUniontown.

BY MARTIN KUZ 

Charles Kittinger stares out from his Mercury Sable at the industrial 
landfill he once owned. A chain-link fence seals off what used to be the 
main entrance. Brown grass covers the earth like a bad toupee. But he 
sees none of that. He's looking into the past, to the day in 1969 or '70 
when the giant eggs arrived. 

Made of stainless steel, the eggs measured six feet wide by eight feet 
long and weighed eight to nine tons, Kittinger recalls. The day before, 
he had received a call from a man asking him to prepare a resting place 
for them. Kittinger told workers to dig a 25-foot-deep ravine near one 
corner of the 30-acre dump. The eggs were rolled off the back of trucks, 
then covered with tons of dirt and fly ash. 

Kittinger remembers two cars following the trucks into the landfill. One 
of the drivers explained that the eggs belonged to the Army and held 
live plutonium cores. The man also gave strict orders: "Don't cut into 
'em, don't remove 'em, and don't tell anybody about 'em." 

So for three decades, Kittinger bit his tongue -- until last year, when 
he saw a TV report that radiation might be leaking from the dump. By 
then, he had come to believe the eggs were nuclear bombs; he dialed up 
federal officials to alert them. They were not happy to hear from him. 

A federal judge ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the 
Department of Justice to launch an inquiry. The covert, eight-month 
probe shot down Kittinger's claims that the eggs existed -- and stopped 
just short of labeling him a nutcase. That no actual digging occurred 
mattered little to the agencies or U.S. District Judge John Manos, who 
agreed that Kittinger's memories were "caused" by news reports. 

Warned by officials to not set foot near the dump, the 74-year-old 
Kittinger stays in his car as he talks, chuckling at the irony. After 30 
years, he found the nerve to step forward. But rather than embrace him 
for having a conscience, the EPA stiff-armed him as a conspiracy loon. 

"I'm not as full of it as the government says I am," he says, his smile 
framed by white wisps of beard and mustache. "I figured if I told 
[officials] about the eggs, they'd get 'em out of there. All they did 
was discredit me, make me look like an idiot." 

He has plenty of company. Since declaring the landfill a Superfund site 
in 1984, the EPA has worked harder to dig into critics than the soil. 
Indeed, despite spending $20 million on its "cleanup," the agency has 
removed exactly none of the dump's 1 million gallons of toxic waste. 

This article can be viewed in its entirety at:
http://clevescene.com/issues/2002-04-25/feature.html/1/index.html

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