Yeah, that is pretty odd about the strip of ground.
I can just imagine the stories you could tell about your time in the Air Force.
Nothing like irradiating yourself with drinking water, right?
We have a fair amount of radon release in basements in this general area. It's not everywhere, but it is around. This was an iron mining area before WW2, so there's a lot of holes in the ground and a lot of tailing piles. Who knows what's in them. I have a small radiation meter that I bought after Fukushima, the background radiation level here is generally fairly low, we didn't get much "hot" rain in this area, it went south of us.