The Missile-Mile Affair

A lonely stretch of highway between London and Portsmouth has become known to the mystery-loving British as Missile Mile. In 1950 Radio Announcer Richard Dimbleby complained to the Surrey police that the windshield of his car had been shattered on that bit of road. The police refused to get excited until car after car suffered the same dam age on the same stretch of highway. After investigation, they announced that the windshields had been smashed by stones thrown up by speeding cars.

The local council ordered the road swept daily, but the damage did not stop, and theories multiplied. The police went hunting, sometimes with dogs, for snipers with stones or rifles. They caught none, and found no projectiles that might have done the damage. Besides, the nature of the damage, a near-opaque network of tiny cracks, did not suggest any solid missile. Said one victim: "It was just like a shutter came down over my eyes."

As the score of smashed windshields mounted, drivers began to avoid the road. Scotland Yard, giving the mystery its best sleuthing treatment, arrived at no solution. The National Road Research Laboratory made test runs to see if the road had a vibration period that smashed windshields. It did not prove its case. The Air Ministry denied that its jet planes could have smashed the windshields with supersonic bangs. Some victims blamed a new kind of glass used in British automobiles, but the same glass does not shatter mysteriously in other parts of Britain.

London's Sunday Graphic discovered that the British government has a secret laboratory only 700 yards from Missile Mile. The lab is hidden behind a country house and surrounded by electronic keep-out warnings. Its job, said the Graphic, is to convert electrical energy into "intensely concentrated pressure waves," and the waves are smashing the windshields. The government admitted the laboratory, but denied everything else. It may be fibbing patriotically, of course, but if the powerful waves exist, they must be odd ones, breaking only windshields, never house windows or the side windows of cars.

A final theory came from a lover of British tradition: that Britain's notorious ghosts, modernized, are now breaking windshields instead of merely rattling chains. If so, they are still unexorcised. Last week the 87th windshield was smashed on Missile Mile.

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