WAMEGO ? Folks living around the former missile silo figured something wasn’t quite right. But they couldn’t put their finger on it.

The fenced, 26-acre area adjoins Lori Morrissey’s property. She recalled the glare of headlights in her bedroom after midnight.

“My husband and I started asking ourselves why they were working in the middle of the night. We thought it was pretty strange,” she recalled.

On the other side of the Atlas-E missile base deactivated in the 1960s, Al Seele remembered the nocturnal traffic. He even told friends at the coffee shop that something wasn’t right.

“If it happened once in a while, that was one thing. But it was night after night. It was one or two at night and then maybe skip a night, but it was several times a week,” he said.

In November 2000, their suspicions were confirmed.

That’s when Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided the site northwest of Wamego in a rural area slowly being overtaken by homes and families.

Pottawatomie County Sheriff Gary Rait said there had been rumors of drug activity at the site, but added, “The rumors never dealt with LSD. We never had sufficient information to mount an investigation.”

DEA agents said there were enough confiscated chemicals to produce at least 36 million doses of LSD, but no LSD had been produced there yet.

Two people were arrested, William Leonard Pickard, 57, and Clyde Apperson, 47, both from the San Francisco area. Their trial is scheduled to begin Monday in U.S. District Court in Topeka.

They are charged with conspiracy to manufacture and distribute and possession with intent to distribute more than 10 grams of LSD. They could face up to life imprisonment if convicted.