A few days ago I received an e-mail with the subject:
” WHAT PILOTS SEE WHEN LANDING AT OFFIT AIRFORCE BASE SAC”
The e-mail had the following images attached:
I am very skeptical of anything I get in an e-mail forward. Skeptical to the point that I assume it is 100% faked unless I can go find a few independent sources to verify whatever the forward is telling me. The fact that they misspelled “Offutt” didn’t lend any credibility to the e-mail.
So… I looked around. The hard part about this e-mail is that there wasn’t much text to work with. Typically you can just plug the first sentence of the e-mail into a Google search and get a lot of information about the origins of the urban legend. (I am skeptical for a reason… maybe 1 in the last 100 forwards turned out to be true)
After not finding anything that looked particularly reputable, I realized: “Hey, I know where Offutt AFB is, and I know a great source for aerial photography!”
I checked a few other sources and the field appears to be blank, and as you can see from the Google image, the message isn’t the same, but I think we at least see that it is apparently true that somebody carves some really neat messages into the fall stubble at the end of the runway.
-Jordan
Nelsons 