by Richard Todd
• • •
Eight years later, in 1955, the brilliant chief of Lockheed’s “Skunk Works,” Kelly Johnson, scouted Groom Lake as a possible site to develop and test his new U-2 spy plane as part of the CIA’s “Project Aquatone.” When Johnson’s plane touched down on the dry lakebed, he described it as “…smooth as a billiard table.” As Johnson scanned the arid landscape, he saw nothing but desert lake. All the structures erected in 1947 had vanished. Aside from two abandoned and overgrown World War II earth runways, no evidence remained that humans had ever visited this place.
Dreamland Research Facility
Area 51
Groom Lake, NV
March 15, 1985
10:25 hours
Dr. Lara Meredith burst out of her lab door and stormed down the hallway toward the elevator, clutching a pair of overhead transparency slides in her hand. Her destination was a debriefing to which she had not been invited. She was never invited to meetings where the senior science staff of Dreamland briefed the generals about their research findings on the Grays. The reason she was left out was because the generals were no longer interested in her research focus, which was the Grays themselves. Lara’s job was to understand everything there was to know about the aliens’ biology and physiology, with the goal of developing bioweapons that could be used against them. The generals were much more engaged in what the spacecraft research team had to report. Over 80 percent of the Dreamland facility’s scientific research capacity was dedicated to analyzing the spacecraft.
The Dreamland facility was nearly as impressive as the extraterrestrials themselves. It was a 250,000 square foot underground complex with the most advanced scientific lab facilities and staff available on the planet. While the facility itself was remarkable, the fact that the Army had managed to keep it a total secret from America’s top spy agency was downright miraculous. When the CIA began breaking ground on their top secret Project Aquatone spy aircraft facility in the ’50’s, they were completely unaware that a giant military complex was operating a few hundred feet beneath the surface of Groom Lake. In addition to the usual top-secret protocols, the Army had gone to great lengths to minimize Dreamland’s physical surface footprint. All traces of its former temporary shelters had been wiped from the landscape, and the facility had been closed ecologically to dramatically shrink the number of resupplies required to maintain it.
As construction of the CIA’s Aquatone facility got underway in earnest, the Army troglodytes eventually decided to surface from their cave and reveal their existence to the Agency. The CIA heads in charge of Aquatone were flabbergasted, a fact that amused the Army generals in charge of Dreamland to no end.
Both the Army and the CIA had planted their flags in the same desert lakebed, and it was clear that neither was going to relocate their colors. The brass of both enterprises eventually conceded that consolidating the perimeters and security of the nation’s two most secret facilities made perfect sense. The CIA’s Aquatone facility was built at Groom Lake, though carefully compartmentalized from the underground Dreamland Research complex.
A team of 200 scientists was assigned to Dreamland. Of those, 36, including Lara, were tasked with studying extraterrestrial biology. Lara, her aliens, staff and equipment were stuffed into a 5,000 square foot lab space that doubled as a morgue for both the aliens, as well as the occasional human that passed in the line of duty.
Though the alien biology lab’s second tier status was not lost on Lara, she couldn’t complain—after all, how many of the world’s scientists got the chance to examine visitors from other planets?
Lara Meredith was born on the Ides of March in 1945 in Waxahachie Texas to an insurance agent father and a stay-at-home mother. From an early age, she demonstrated an outsized aptitude for math—so much so that her parents were convinced that they had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital.
A math and science prodigy in her childhood years, she skipped two grades in elementary school and graduated from Waxahachie Global High School at the age of 16.
In 1962, while Lara studied biology at the University of Texas, Francis Crick and James Watson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. Watson and Crick shared their prize with Maurice Wilkins, a molecular biologist at Kings College. Their work hooked Lara on the field of genomics.
As Lara studied Crick, Watson, and Wilkins’ research, she stumbled on references to a Rosalind Franklin, whose work at Kings College with X-Ray diffraction had contributed to Crick and Watson’s discovery. Dismissed by Crick and Watson as a minor player in the quest to divine the structure of DNA, Franklin had virtually disappeared from the story of one of the greatest discoveries of the twentieth century.
Rosalind Franklin
The deeper Lara drilled into the backstory, the more skeptical she became that Franklin’s role was really the bit part that the Nobel Laureates had assigned her. She discovered that one of Dr. Franklin’s painstaking X-ray diffraction images of DNA, the so called “Photo 51,” had produced the eureka moment that drove Crick and Watson’s discovery of the molecule’s double helix structure.
The grainy photo depicted a horizontal series of smudges that formed an “X” shape. The X shape image resulted from X-rays bouncing, or diffracting, off the DNA molecule’s atoms, revealing the helix structure of the molecule. Gaps in the “X” indicated that a second helix was present, intertwined with the first.
Photo 51
Franklin understood DNA’s double helical structure well prior to Watson and Crick’s epiphany. Franklin also understood the correct orientation of the phosphates and sugars relative to the base pairs, though Watson and Crick, weak on chemistry, stubbornly insisted that hydrophobic material should be exposed, unprotected, on the outside of their model.
Maurice Wilkins had a rocky relationship with Franklin, whom he treated as more of a subordinate than an equal. Without Franklin’s knowledge or permission, he leaked her research, including Photo 51, to Crick and Watson. His subterfuge netted a Nobel Prize for himself, Crick, and Watson, and left Franklin an obscure footnote in the annals of genomic research.
In his bestselling book, The Double Helix, Watson devoted considerable ink to criticism of Dr. Franklin, writing, “By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were quite strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. She did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents.”
Lara was incensed. Watson was describing a brilliant Cambridge Ph.D. scientist from whom he may well have hustled the Nobel Prize. Describing Franklin by her dress and makeup was like the Nobel Committee evaluating the scientific merits of Watson’s achievement by taking inventory of the mop like comb over of his receding hairline, his bad teeth, bug eyes, and a physique better suited for a praying mantis than a steamy stud muffin male.
Lara wrote a paper about Rosalind Franklin, presenting her evidence that Dr. Franklin deserved the Nobel Prize that was bestowed upon Watson, Crick, and Wilkins. The paper was poorly received by UT faculty members, who did not look kindly on an upstart like Lara sullying the gods of genomics.
Lara decided it was time to move on. She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford and then became an Associate Professor at Columbia in 1970 at the ripe old age of 25. On her first day at work at Columbia, her new lab boss asked her to fetch him a cup of coffee. She returned with a glass Erlenmeyer chemistry flask full of a steaming dark liquid and set it on his desk.
“What’s that?” her boss asked.
“Where I come from, we call it coffee,” she replied.
Their eyes met in a brief stare down, before her boss laughed out loud. Dr. Meredith was going to be a handful. He gamely drank his coffee out of the flask and never asked her to make it again.
At Columbia, Lara did groundb
reaking work with two-dimensional chromatography that laid the foundation for the Holy Grail of genomic projects: the sequencing of human DNA.
Her work caught the attention of the Army brass at Dreamland, who needed someone to head up the project to map Gray DNA. When two Army generals showed up in her tiny university office one day with an offer to run a DNA sequencing project with unlimited resources, she was convinced someone was perpetrating a twisted hoax. Practical DNA sequencing was well beyond early 1970’s technology. It would be an enormously expensive and time-consuming project. Her offhand estimate was 20 years, including time to organize the project, equipment, and staff. Additionally, there was no such thing as “unlimited resources” in academic genomics, where professors were forever pitching for shoestring grant money to keep their research on life support.
When Lara realized the generals weren’t joking, she jumped at the chance of a lifetime. She packed up and headed to Groom Lake. When she arrived at Area 51, she realized the generals had left out two important details. The first was that her research facility was over 200 feet underground. The second detail was that her research subjects were not from this planet.
“Wow,” she said when they slid one of the Grays out of his refrigerated morgue storage locker. “That is very cool!”
• • •
In the elevator, Lara rapid fire punched the first floor button. Five floors above her, at the briefing meeting Lara was about to crash, three generals were seated on one side of a large black conference table in a concrete-walled conference room that resembled a bunker. Though Dreamland was big on science, it was spartan on creature comforts. An overhead projector seated on the conference table lit up a screen erected on the far side of the room. Opposite the generals, seated in a wheelchair was a white-haired man with a comical grin and tinted glasses. His wispy hair appeared as though someone had plopped white cotton candy atop his head. Dr. Gunther Appel was 62. After the movie “Dr. Strangelove” was released, Dr. Appel’s resemblance to Peter Seller’s “Strangelove” character was so uncanny that he inherited the nickname from his colleagues and staff.
Polio left a young Gunther Appel paraplegic. Without his legs, he relied instead upon his imagination to propel him throughout the stars, aided by the works of Jules Verne. At the Technical University of Munich, he studied physics and aerospace engineering, with the goal of applying his skillset to the new field of rocketry. Recruited by the Third Reich, Gunther played a key role in developing the V-1 “buzz bomb,” the world’s first cruise missile.
At 22 years old, Gunther was the youngest member of Wernher von Braun’s team of rocketry scientists ferried out of Germany at the end of World War II as part of “Operation Paperclip.” The goal of Paperclip was to jumpstart America’s rocket program while denying Nazi Germany’s brain trust to the Soviets. Paperclip was a Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JOIA) project. President Truman signed off on the program with the caveat that none of the Germans recruited were to “have been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism.” Because this exemption would have disqualified virtually every German rocketeer, the JOIA solved the problem by creating false biographies and resumes for the scientists. Through its political cleansing process, the JOIA successfully de-Nazified all of its scientists.
Between 1945 and 1950, von Braun’s team was stationed at desolate Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, on the border of Mexico. There, von Braun, the legendary creator of the V2 rocket, reported to a pimple-faced 26-year old major with little interest in advancing the state of the art of aerospace science. The US government was much more keen on keeping the rocketeers away from the Soviets than it was in harnessing their talent to advance American rocket technology.
In 1950, Gunther moved with von Braun to the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville Alabama, where he worked on development of the Redstone rocket. Shortly before the Soviets launched Sputnik, Gunther and several of his colleagues were approached to go to work at the Dreamland complex. For Gunther and his fellow scientists, it was less of a request than an order. The scientists understood well that their treatment depended entirely upon their level of cooperation. They half-joked that they were “PoP’s” or “Prisoners of Peace” in the United States.
For over a quarter century, Gunther had lived in this strange underground facility. The work was fascinating, to be sure, though it had been decades since he had seen the breathtaking mountains and lush green of his native Bavaria. He doubted he would ever see his home again.
Gunther now faced the three Army generals—one lieutenant general and two major generals. One of the major generals, Andrew Chaffee, was new to the Dreamland facility. To Gunther, the three white middle-aged white men with buzz cuts were practically indistinguishable from one another.
“Good morning gentlemen,” Dr. Appel began in his accented English. “With your permission, I will begin the briefing.”
“Go ahead Doctor,” replied Lieutenant General James Patterson.
“For the benefit of General Chaffee, who is new to our group, I will begin with a summary of our research and findings. As you know, nearly 40 years ago, the spacecraft wreckage was brought to Groom Lake for triage examination. Eventually, this facility was constructed, in which our research has continued. After the completion of the Dreamland complex, the bodies of the extraterrestrials were transferred here from their temporary home at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.”
“Something that perplexed us from the outset of our work was the lack of features on the spacecraft. The craft appeared to have no means of propulsion, no instrumentation, no controls, no features of any kind. The fragments that broke away from the spacecraft were solid objects. We tried cutting into them to determine if they were hollow and if they contained any mechanisms. Again, they were solid matter—there was nothing inside.”
Gunther asked his assistant to place a transparency on the projector. It was an image of one of the fragments, a charcoal-colored object. The photograph was dated May 17, 1949.
“This is one of the fragments,” Gunther said. It appears to be an ordinary piece of some graphite-type material. However, when we take a closer look, we find something very interesting.”
Gunther asked his assistant to display the next slide. An image showing an intricate lattice network displayed on the screen.
“This is a small sliver of the object, magnified 2000 times,” said Gunther. “It reveals an artificial network of some kind. When we took an even closer look at the network, using an electron microscope, this is what we found…”
Gunther’s assistant placed the next transparency on the overhead projector. A fuzzy image of white glowing hexagons resting atop a lattice substrate appeared on the projection screen.
Gunther continued, “This is an electron microscope scan of a portion of one of the spacecraft fragments. We found that the craft’s mechanisms are embedded into the hull at the molecular level.”
“What is that—some kind of micro circuitry?” asked General Patterson.
“It is circuitry, but much, much smaller than our current micro circuitry,” replied Gunther, “These circuits are comprised entirely of carbon molecules. Some of these structures are 2,500 times smaller than that of a red blood cell.”
“How is that possible?” asked General Patterson.
“We did not fully understand how it was possible until a breakthrough discovery happened this year,” Gunther began, “Three scientists at Rice and Sussex Universities created a new carbon allotrope, or molecule, that has the potential to revolutionize miniature technology. The new molecule also explains the Gray circuitry perfectly.”
Gunther asked his assistant to display an image that looked like several stacked sections of chicken wire. Each section was a lattice of connected hexagonal structures.
“This is a graphical representation of a graphite molecule, a carbon allotrope. As you can see, each carbon atom is bonded to three other carbon atoms. The
exceptions are the edges of the lattices, where the bonds dangle. Carbon and other atoms, like hydrogen, are attracted to those dangling bonds. Because other carbon atoms are attracted, the lattice does not have a fixed number of carbon atoms.”
“The Rice and Sussex scientists, Richard Smalley, Harold Kroto, and Robert Curl, inadvertently created a new carbon molecule by firing a laser at a graphite target. The molecule consistently had 60 carbon atoms—no more, no less. Because a traditional carbon molecule structure would not have a fixed number of carbon atoms due to the dangling bonds, they realized that they had created a fundamentally new carbon molecule structure. The only way that it was possible for the molecule to have a fixed number of carbon atoms was if all of the carbon atoms were connected to each other—there could be no dangling bonds. They theorized that the molecule had some form of closed cage structure. The question was: what structure and shape would enable 60 carbon atoms to connect with each other?”
