I can get endlessly fascinated about things that most people would probably never even notice.

Take my trip to Las Vegas back in April... a mystery arose from that visit that I have actually spent time trying to solve, without success.

Until last night.  The answer came upon me completely unexpected, from the unlikeliest of all places... the Firefly series.

So, the trip to Vegas... aside from hanging out with mom and dad and my brother, saw a lot of neat stuff.  Shinys everywhere, as moonchylde would likely say...

Some odd stuff, too...

Oh, goodie!  Only 2, 554 more miles to go!  heh... Are we there yet?

Went to the Mirage, which has a really cool gigantic aquarium in the lobby... it is much larger than this picture indicates!

Also at the Mirage, is Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden & Dolphin Habitat, which was pretty neat.  I know, I know, I see all kinds of neat animals at work every day, but still...

We don't have any black panthers at the zoo... or white lions!  The male white lions were lounging where I couldn't get a good look at them, unfortunately...

We do have snow leopards... but this one was crazy!  He was desperately trying to get at a gigantic white tiger!  Kitty, that guy would have eaten you for lunch if the fences hadn't been there!

At the Bellagio, they have a really neat Conservatory & Botanical Gardens...

It had a really cool butterfly habitat too...

But, I digress... the mystery...

As some of you may know, I like to explore.  This includes taking alternate routes to my destinations.  When I went to Vegas this time, I took one such route.  There really is only one way to get there from Los Angeles, which is, of course, the I-15.  However, you can get to the I-15 via many different routes... this time I went up through the Antelope Valley to the 58, which I took to Barstow, and then to the 15.  The 58 is really just a two lane surface street with delusions of grandeur.

While cruising through the desert along the 58, I passed an old junk yard.  It was notable because there were a lot of old military aircraft!

After I pulled off of the road and got closer, I could look over the fence for a better view.

There was an old Huey helicopter...

The fuselage of what appeared to be an F/A-18 Hornet, which is odd, since they are still in front line service...

Three F-111 Aardvarks... these used to basically be strategic bombers!  They were replaced by the F-117, but still, finding them out in the desert was odd to me... hmmm... what the heck is that white thing on the left?

An old Sikorsky S-56, the largest piston-engine powered helicopter ever made (turbine engines came along and were much more powerful and efficient).  This one was obviously later used by some civilian outfit before winding up here in the desert.  There's that white thing again, on the right... what is it?

Here's another view of it, with one of those F-111s in the background.  What the heck is that thing?

This is the best view from over the fence I could get.  At first, I thought it might be the airframe from an old MI-24 Hind-D... but, what would an old Soviet helicopter gunship be doing out in the desert?  Especially painted white, with what appears to be some kind of medical insignia on it?  Besides, it looks too small.  This was the mystery... most people would likely never even have noticed this, or if they had, they would have forgotten it right away.  

But not me... I have spent more than a few hours trying to decipher this.  There were no signs or markings of any kind around the junk yard, and my online searches have proved fruitless.  In the past couple months, I had pretty much given up the search for an answer... although I still thought about it from time to time.

Then, last night, I watched a couple of episodes of Firefly, including Ariel.  In this episode, the crew of Serenity acquires a flying ambulance and infiltrates an Alliance hospital in order to steal valuable medicine, and to help Simon get River to an imaging machine so he can try to figure out what was done to her.

A-HA!  THE FLYING AMBULANCE!

Mystery solved... it's the full-sized prop used in the show. 

Now then... what the hell is it doing out there?  The junkyard did not look like the one that appeared in the episode, so I doubt it was filmed there... 

Tags: firefly

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