Police in Washington sent a bomb squad to a local house after its owner tried donating a rocket built to carry nuclear warheads to the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
The Dayton, Ohio, museum called the Bellevue Police Department Wednesday after a local resident, unnamed by police, contacted the museum about donating a rocket part.
The rocket had belonged to the man’s dead neighbor, who had acquired the piece from an estate sale, police said in a blog Friday.
On Thursday, the department’s bomb squad went to the man’s house to examine the rocket. The piece was the fuselage of the Douglas AIR-2 Genie, an air-to-air rocket meant to carry a 1.5-kiloton nuclear warhead, police said.
There was no warhead attached and no rocket fuel, and as such posed no explosive risk, police said. The rocket will now be restored ahead of its eventual display at the Air Force Museum.
The Douglas AIR-2 Genie was only fired once with live ammunition at a July 19, 1957, test over Yucca Flats, Nevada, per the Air Force museum. The test was also the only time any U.S. nuclear-tipped air-to-air rocket was detonated.