■Nathan Shiga: December 11

A cylindrical object marked “US” was found dropped out of the blue on the roof of a local nursery December 7. The Ginowan City police made an inquiry into its identity to the Okinawa Defense Bureau.

The US Camp Foster initially told the bureau that the said object could be some “cover” falling off a military helicopter but later informed the Okinawa Defense Bureau on December 11 that it could not have been a fallout of a chopper as all the choppers are intact and no cover-like parts are missing.

Chief Koichiro Nakajima of the ODB told Mayor Atsuji Sakima of Ginowan City of his tete-a-tete with Brigadier General Paul J. Rock Jr., in which the brigadier had identified the object to be the cover of a system that detects damages on the rotor blade part of the US military helicopter CH53 but not of any CH53 at Futenma Base as “all the choppers there are intact with none of that particular part missing”.

Mayor Sakima commented:

“We can not readily believe that the object was not a fallout of an airborne chopper as it had actually fallen on the roof causing plenty of worries on the part of local people.

“We must insist on further investigation on the identity of that particular object and how it had fallen as it did on the roof of a nursery.

A local housewife with a 5-year daughter at the nursery says:

“It might be that there wasn’t anybody actually watching it fall but there were many who heard it fall.

“Further, the object was actually there on the roof. We wish the US military to send someone to the nursery to explain how it all happened.”

Well, it’s a delicate issue. It can end up an argument that gets us nowhere: either a case of US military authorities covering up what did happen or a local anti-US element cooking up a story. Purely personal, I’m inclined to support the latter. We shall see.

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