How (and Why) the FBI Mysteriously Shut Down a Federal Solar Observatory

For many years, the observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, did its job without much fanfare. Instruments up there, on the 9,200-foot Sacramento Peak, watched the Sun—the sort of star you yourself are not supposed to look at through a telescope.

In early September 2018, though, Sunspot Solar Observatory broke into the national consciousness, and not for a stellar scientific discovery. Instead, the facility made headlines because it and the small surrounding town had been evacuated, because, rumors said, it had been shut down by the FBI.

Speculation did its thing: Perhaps the instruments on the peak had gotten too close to a good secret—whether that was of an alien presence, or goings-on at nearby military installations. Maybe the Sun itself would soon send an apocalyptic storm our way.

The observatory remained closed for 11 days, with the organization that oversees the facility—the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), a consortium of educational institutions that operates telescopes for NASA and the National Science Foundation—keeping relatively mum. On September 16, 2018, though, the group released a statement: “AURA has been cooperating with an on-going law enforcement investigation of criminal activity that occurred at Sacramento Peak,” it read, in part. “During this time, we became concerned that a suspect in the investigation potentially posed a threat to the safety of local staff and residents. For this reason, AURA temporarily vacated the facility and ceased science activities at this location.”

Not long after, the public learned that the investigation dealt with the dissemination of child sexual abuse material, from a Sunspot network.

Almost exactly four years later, the case went to criminal trial. The state charged Joshua Cope, who worked as a janitor at the observatory, with two counts of the possession of child pornography, and one of its distribution.

On Monday, September 12, 2022, Cope appeared at Alamogordo’s district courthouse, to face the evidence against him.

The day trial began, the small courtroom was filled—or sort of filled, given an attempt at social distancing—with masked members of the Cope family and family friends. In the hallway, a sign above the water fountain noted that you’re not allowed to spit tobacco into it.

Over the course of three days, witnesses from the observatory, the Cope family, the FBI, the New Mexico District Attorney’s office, and the New Mexico State University Police Department testified about events and evidence surrounding the Sunspot happenings from years ago. Their memories, analysis, and data cohered into a timeline that, strangely, leaves out the evacuation that brought Sunspot onto the nation’s radar in the first place.

The story begins in a lot of ways with a man who carries the title “chief observer.”

“My name is Doug Gilliam,” he began, in his testimony, “and I work at the Dunn Solar Telescope.”

This is the site’s flagship instrument, housed in a pyramidal white building that rises 136 feet above the ground, the structure diving around 220 more feet below. Down the mountain, from the highway next to Alamogordo’s Holloman Air Force Base, you can see its spire spearing the sky, pointing up toward the nearby star that is the object of its attention.

Gilliam, who carried crutches with him to the stand, has been overseeing the Dunn’s science operations for 20 years.

“Was there a time when you located something that was unusual?” the prosecutor, Roxeanne Esquibel, asked him.

There was. One day, in May 2018, when he was fixing the computer of an emeritus researcher, Gilliam noticed a light between the desktop tower and the wall. It was shining from a laptop, he realized, a “small form-factor Lenovo,” plugged in and partially cracked open like a book, wedged in next to the larger computer.

Curious, he took the laptop out and opened it up. The display came on. At first, he didn’t recognize the picture that appeared, till he rotated the device. There it was: adult female genitalia. The image flashed, then disappeared, and another popped up, he claimed: a male kid, standing in a darkly-lit room, wearing underwear, a T-shirt, and a cat mask.

“As I was sitting there looking, it went black,” Gilliam says. All of this with no stated action on his part.

The whole thing was weird, he thought—but he had work to get back to, people waiting on him. He replaced the laptop and moved on. As he drove home that night, he recalled thinking, “Obviously, that first image was not good for the workplace.” The fact that a picture of a kid, though clothed, came right after gave him pause, but he didn’t think it was illegal.

He kept quiet.

Gilliam found the laptop again, around two weeks later, when he was searching for hardware and software in a different office. This time, he testified, it was on the floor under a desk—with LEDs indicating it was powered up, but showing no display.

He kept quiet.

The same thing happened around two weeks later, in another office, Gilliam claimed, when he discovered the computer behind some books on a shelving unit. “I never reported this to anyone,” he told Esquibel.

In the defense’s cross-examination, Gilliam’s strange-seeming reticence came up. There was, after all, a laptop with no apparent owner, showing at least one pornographic image, hidden in various places around a federal facility. “If you see something, say something,” perhaps would apply here.

“It was something you should have reported, right?” a defense lawyer, Lauren Truitt, later asked.

“Looking back on it,” Gilliam said, “yes, probably.”

The fourth time Gilliam discovered the Lenovo, he was cleaning a large room where telescope equipment lived.

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