He spent a week pouring over computer diagrams and finally, one night, he traced the problem to a technical glitch in the programming logic. He started wondering what the tiny light controlled and why it only came on every other time the launch sequence failed. “Every other time we tried to make this launch work, this little red light came on,” Witmer recalls. Witmer tracked the changes to see if there was a meaningful correlation, but it turned out to be more likely caused by heavy traffic on nearby train tracks. They suspected the misalignment was caused by tidal movement in the Duwamish River. The engineers started noticing that the critical angles between the missile and the North Star began to change from day to day. So it would look up there with an instrument equivalent to a surveyor’s transit.” Engineers used the tube to help measure angles, make calculations, position mirrors, and eventually shine a light beam into the missile to tell it where to go. “This tube was lined up with the North Star. “There was a special little tube that came down from the surface of the ground,” Witmer explains. But it relied on the same ancient navigational tool that mariners once used: The North Star. The technology was complex and cutting edge. Witmer spent a lot of time puzzling over problems in the Minuteman missile’s guidance system, which would get a missile from its launch point to a target half way around the world. I wouldn’t say it was an eerie sort of thing it was just our place of work.” It was like going down a ladder in a submarine. “You got down inside the silo by going down a ladder. Today, remnants of the old silo are still visible in a parking lot off East Marginal Way. It was part of Boeing’s developmental center, located across the street from the present-day Museum of Flight. But there’s another image that stands out even more: the image of crawling down inside a tube about 70 feet deep containing a Minuteman missile. He can still picture the line of extra food cans he and his wife stockpiled in his Bellevue apartment. Witmer remembers the Cuban Missile crises. President Kennedy went public with the news on October 22, 1962. It’s also the year that the US discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. That’s the year when he started working for Boeing as a newly minted engineer. Witmer says East Marginal Way looked a lot different in 1962. Retired Boeing engineer Dan Witmer is one of the few remaining people in Seattle who knows what that dome is covering up: a defunct Minuteman missile silo. But dig a little deeper and you’ll discover a forgotten link to Seattle’s Cold War past. From the surface, it looks like a grayish-green dome on a pile of rubble. There’s a mysterious object standing in a parking lot just eight miles south of downtown Seattle.
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