Highlands Air Force Station

Highlands Air Force Station was a Navesink Highlands military installation in Middletown Township near the borough of Highlands, New Jersey. The station provided ground-controlled interception radar coverage as part of the Lashup Radar Network and the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment network, as well as providing radar coverage for the Highlands Army Air Defense Site. The site's 240 acres is now the Rocky Point section in Hartshorne Woods Park of the Monmouth County Parks System.



Early installations
The Navesink Highlands had a sea navigation beacon in 1746, and the Twin Lights north tower was built in 1828. The New Jersey Highlands were used for antebellum flag signaling experiments that communicated with Fort Tomkins on Staten Island in 1859. Guglielmo Marconi had a 1899 radio station on the hill near the north tower.

Seacoast defense and 1930s radar testing
In World War I, a mortar battery was placed on the Navsink Highlands for seacoast defense. By 1933, Harold A. Zahl's radio range experiments had begun from the Twin Lights lighthouse, and an August 1935 US Army Signal Corps radar test at the lighthouse allowed a searchlight beam to track an aircraft. An SCR-268 radar assembled in August 1938 was demonstrated at the "Twin Lights, N. J." lighthouse in 1939. Battery Isaac N. Lewis on the hill was a World War II seacoast defense site.

Twin Lights station
The "Twin Lights station" was an Army radar site with a control center. The station was used for a November 1939 demonstration to the Secretary of War in which radar data was networked from the local SCR-270 radar and, via telephone, from one in Connecticut that both tracked a Mitchel Field B-17 bomber formation. From 1942-5, the site had a World War II Westinghouse SCR-271 radar for early warning and in 1948, Air Defense Command activated the 646th Aircraft Control Squadron at Highlands AFS with a General Electric AN/CPS-6 Radar providing data to the Manual Control Center at Roslyn Air Warning Station, New York. In 1955 a General Electric AN/FPS-8 Radar for medium range surveillance was installed southwest of the lighthouse (later converted to a General Electric AN/GPS-3 Radar that remained until 1960.) By 1957, the site was 229 acre and an additional area was planned for Army housing. In 1958, a height finder General Electric AN/FPS-6 Radar was added to the site.

SAGE site
In 1958, Highlands Air Force Station began providing data to Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) direction center DC-01 at McGuire AFB which had Air Defense Command interceptor aircraft and CIM-10 Bomarc surface-to-air missiles. In September 1959, Highlands was the first site with a General Electric AN/FPS-7 Radar for long range surveillance. (A U.S. Army Signal Missile Master Support Detachment provided site maintenance. ) Texas Tower 4 (call sign "Dora") was an offshore radar annex of Highlands operated by a 646th flight from 1959 until it collapsed into the Atlantic Ocean in 1961, killing 28 people. In 1960 the Air Force installed an AN/FPS-6B height-finder radar at Highlands which, along with the AN/FPS-6, had been replaced by 1963 with AN/FPS-26A and AN/FPS-90 sets. The United States Secretary of Defense announced on 20 November 1964, that the Air Force operations would be closed.

The Highlands Army Air Defense Site (HAADS) was established east of the station in 1958 with a Missile Master nuclear bunker which used the USAF radar data. HAADS assumed control of the USAF station after the DoD had announced its closure for July 1966 (the USAF squadron inactivated on 1 July 1966). Army use of the former USAF radars ended in 1974 when the Nike missile program ended, USAF structures were demolished in the early 1990s, and a few building foundations remain in a small clearing within the site's overgrowth of vegetation.