It’s the garage find of the century: an inert Cold War rocket, the type designed to carry a nuclear warhead.
Police in a Seattle suburb said their bomb squad got called out when a military museum contacted them on Wednesday about an apparently aging and rusty missile.
According to the Bellevue Police Department, which blogged about the incident, a Bellevue resident expressed interest in donating an item that belonged to his deceased neighbour.
“The man stated that his neighbour had originally purchased the item from an estate sale,” said police, adding the missile — later determined to be inert — was found in the deceased resident’s garage.
Police say its bomb squad inspected the rusting object and found it was a McDonnell Douglas AIR-2 Genie, an unguided air-to-air rocket that was designed to carry a 1.5-kiloton W25 nuclear warhead.
No warhead was attached to the missile and there was no rocket fuel, “essentially meaning that the item was an artifact with no explosive hazard.”
Police added, “Because the item was inert and the military did not request it back, police left the item with the neighbour to be restored for display in a museum.”
Various sources listed the missile as being around nine feet tall and 18 inches in diameter.
The Air Force Armament Museum Foundation says the rocket was used by the U.S. and Canada during a period of the Cold War when interception of Soviet strategic bombers was a major military concern.
The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, which is located in Ohio, says the missile was first test-launched in 1956 and became operational in January 1957.
And on July 19, 1957, one was launched from 18,000 feet (5,500 metres) and detonated over Yucca Flats in Nevada. It was the first and only test detonation of a U.S. nuclear-tipped air-to-air rocket.
The museum says thousands were built before production ended in 1962, and that they remained in service until the mid-1980s.
For garage-heads, would you restore and display the inert missile?
Whatever the answer, Bellevue police noted on social media that “we think it’s gonna be a long, long time before we get another call like this again,” adding a rocket emoji.