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Mojave Trails National Monument
Desert Megaphone
It took a lot of work to have it made in the first place. Fabricated of two 4-foot long megaphone-shaped pieces of iron bolted together the desert megaphone sits high on top of a lonely granite hill deep in the Mojave Desert.
My theory on what the desert megaphone is is just what it is called--a megaphone. I believe it was installed atop this small mountain assisted by helicopter as a stationary warning siren to be used during Exercise Desert Strike in May 1964 and abandoned in place after completion of the war games.
Historians have throughly searched available records, newspaper articles written and now with the internet communication regarding this strange object has increased exponentially, but no one has ever come up with a plausible explanation as to why it is there.
Excercise Desert Strike
United States military training exercise since World War II was conducted in May 1964 by the U.S. Strike Command in adjoining areas of California, Arizona, and Nevada. It was also the first armored exercise held in the United States since World War II. Two joint task forces with a total of over 100,000 personnel of the U.S. Air Force and Army, over 900 aircraft, and more than 500 tanks battled for nearly two weeks on a ground maneuver area of some 13 million acres in the desert region of southwestern United States. As in past joint exercises, tactical nuclear weapons training was conducted during the play of the exercise.Appropriately called Desert Strike, the air maneuver area covered three quarters of a million square miles, with aircraft operating from 28 widely dispersed air bases extending from the State of Washington through Texas.
Attaching a Venturi tube would amplify the volume of the siren.
Giovanni Battista Venturi 1746 - 1822 was an Italian physicist, who described the decrease in fluid pressure that takes place in such a tube in 1797
~ Merriam-Webster