by Phil Patton
PRAISE FOR DREAMLAND
“A brilliant book in which nothing is as it seems, while everything has a rational explanation, and yet, even so, the ‘rational’ is its own sort of Dracula.”
—JOHN LEONARD, The Nation
“Nonfiction matter to the novelistic anti-matter of Don DeLillo’s recent Underworld, Dreamland is a brilliantly realized tale of the untold, of U.S. secrecy that’s been held like a breath and the farce of its being held too long … a must-read for dreamers and skeptics alike.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A rare literary work from the ascendant culture that mingles technology, popular culture, and science fiction with alienation, suspicion, and disconnection from mainstream media, politics, and government.”
—JON KATZ, HotWired
“This eloquent and frequently astounding book takes readers along on an audacious, circuitous exploration of the desert landscape in and around the most secret military bases in the American West, and of the psychological landscape of fantasy, lore and suspicion that surrounds them.… Patton has produced the definitive account of this strange corner of the world and of an even stranger corner of the national psyche.”
—HAL ESPEN, Outside
“Patton evokes an idealistic covert fraternity whose paranoia and disinformation seeped beyond the borders of Area 51.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A psychic probe into the inner nerd of America.”
—KEVIN KELLY, author of New Rules of the New Economy
“Patton travels beyond the physical location of Area 51 to the psychic location of those who must believe that in the sky exists a world we are not meant to know.… A fascinating meditation on delusion and desire, this is an American tale.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[Patton] is an observer, a careful listener, a recounter of facts. So he lets UFOs hang there, shadowy forms above the dry bed of Groom Lake, until the closing pages of the book, when he revisits the question and leaves us—refreshingly—with a few open-minded and perspicacious thoughts.”
—The Washington Post
“[Patton] has written a weird, wonderful, sometimes spooky account of what can only be called a contemporary myth, a ‘parable about knowledge and secrecy.’ ”
—American Way
“With one hand on the steering wheel and a pile of brilliantly distilled research on the passenger seat, [Patton] cruises across the arid West and narrates a tale that is curiously epic, frequently humorous, and always entertaining.”
—Tucson Weekly
Copyright © 1998 by Phil Patton
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
VILLARD BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book was originally published in hardcover by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1998.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.: Excerpt from pgs. 166–167 of Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America’s Fall from Grace, by David Beers. Copyright © 1996 by David Beers. Excerpt from Mission with LeMay, by Curtis E. LeMay and MacKinlay Kantor. Copyright © 1965 by Curtis E. LeMay and MacKinlay Kantor. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.
Opryland Music Group: Excerpt from the lyrics to “Great Atomic Power,” by Ira Louvin, Buddy Bain, and Charlie Louvin. Copyright © 1952 by Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. Copyright renewed 1980 by Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. International rights secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Opryland Music Group.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Patton, Phil.
Dreamland : travels inside the secret world of Roswell and Area 51 / Phil Patton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82860-6
1. Area 51 (Nev.) 2. Unidentified flying objects. I. Title.
UG634.5.A74P38 1999
001.942’09793′14—dc21 97-48659
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
v3.1_r1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
At the Boneyard
1. On the Ridge
2. The Black Mailbox
3. “They’re Here!”
4. Aurora
5. Maps
6. “The Great Atomic Power”
7. Victory Through Airpower
8. “Something Is Seen”
9. Ike’s Toothache
10. Paradise Ranch
11. The Blackbirds
12. Low Observables
13. The Decentral Intelligence Agency; or, “Use of Deadly Farce Authorized”
14. Black Manta
15. “Redlight” and “MJ”
16. The Real Men in Black?
17. Red Square, Red Hats, and STUDs
18. El Mirage and Darkstar
19. The Remote Location
20. The Anthill and Other Burlesques
21. Space Aliens from the Pentagon and Other Conspiracies
22. Searchlight
23. “Job Knowledge”
24. Rave
25. Remote Viewing; or, “Anomalous Cognition”
26. The White Mailbox
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
At the Boneyard
“You didn’t see that,” the officer said.
We were walking amid aircraft in the Arizona desert. It was a boneyard, like the one in the famous scene in the film The Best Years of Our Lives, where planes await the day they will either fly again—perhaps for some Third World air patrol—or be crushed in great machines and melted down into pure aluminum. Hundreds of acres of aircraft shimmered silver in the desert sun south of Tucson—an elephants’ graveyard of planes. Military police in blue berets and shiny black boots driving blue pickup trucks patrolled the perimeters. German shepherds rode with them.
The commander of the facility talked too much. It was not a big career builder, this command, and he talked endlessly about how important the job they did here was, that it was like a blood bank for aircraft parts, not a graveyard. He hated the word graveyard. I suspected he had been given this job because he talked too much.
We walked down the long aisles of Vietnam-era F-105s, their canopies bandaged white like eye-surgery patients, the tiger teeth painted on their noses dulled, the red stars commemorating downed MiGs chipped and peeling. Wherever exposed, the Plexiglas of windows and canopies was scratched, dulled, cataracted. The sun had blistered and flaked the colorful unit symbols, faded the elaborate, delicate green-and-brown mottling of camouflage, and smeared the standard-issue military stencils, NO STEP and RESCUE.
We passed green oxygen tanks stacked in pyramids like cannonballs, ejection seats lined up in a phantom theater, white radomes piled like dinosaur eggs, the black cubes of old altimeters.
There were planes I knew only from putting together models of them in my childhood. Hellcat, Avenger, Hustler, Starfighter, Voodoo, Thunderchief. Aggressive names a kid would like.
In an area they called “the Back Forty” sat acres of B-52s, their backs broken open to reveal green innards. A clown chorus of bulb-nosed helicopters grinned at us as we walked by. Grass and sagebrush had grown knee-high among flattened tires. Birds nested behind ailerons and flaps, jackrabbits lived in jet intakes. E
ven in broad daylight, the Back Forty is a ghostly place. It’s the noise, the creaking of old aluminum, the writhing rustle in the wind of dangling metal and spaghetti wire, the low whistle of an occasional breeze.
I met a man who had worked in the boneyard for thirty years. He was from Waco, Texas, and his skin had been cured to a leathery red-brown by grease and dust and sun. He paused from his work and said, “I always make sure to slap the side of an airplane with a wrench or something to scare out the rattlers and bull snakes and Gila monsters before I get too close.”
He was removing an engine. “Some days,” he said, “it gets so hot out we have to keep the tools in buckets of cold water just so we can pick them up.
“This whole field used to be covered with ’36s,” he said—B-36s, the huge bombers that flew over my house when I was a child, growing up during the Cold War, under the aegis of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) and the eagle vision of Curtis E. LeMay. “Had to bring smelters right out here in the field to sweat ’em down. They were too big to move. For days there were columns of black smoke.”
Other craft are dragged to the edge of the field, then chopped by guillotine into parts small enough for the smelter, a huge piece of machinery. At its base, the oven emits a liquid as bright as mercury, as thin as water, coursing thinner than you expect metal ever to flow. Molten is too thick and stolid a word for this metal, which quickly cools in ingots that are shipped off to be turned into auto parts, pots and pans, folding lawn chairs.
I spent a whole day at the boneyard. Near the end of it, I caught sight of something in the corner of my vision, a black shape, like a big engine with vestigial wings, with no windows or canopy—no face—no wheels, its shape biological, aquatic perhaps. It seemed greedy and insensate like a deep-ocean-dwelling creature, with the hungry mouth of a ramjet front, as sinister and mysterious as if it had come from another world altogether.
“You didn’t see that,” the base commander and tour guide said evenly. We paused and looked for a while, then moved on.
I did not know it yet, but I had seen my first piece of Dreamland.
1. On the Ridge
Beyond the Jumbled Hills, in the wide Emigrant Valley of southern Nevada, bracketed by the Timpahute and Pahranagat ranges, lies Groom Lake, just one of many dry lakes that dot the desert reaches of Nevada and California, an expanse of white, hard alkaline soil—caliche soil. Rocky Mountain sheep and wild burros often wander onto its surface, and for years the bare weathered horned skull of a sheep sat here, a Western cliché as accent mark. Relentless winds lift small pebbles and drive them across the surface. Once or twice a year, a couple of inches of rain leave a thin liquid layer, a mock lake, shimmering and wavy, whose evaporation rapidly smoothes it to a high polish. The land sat like this for centuries before the asphalt and metal buildings, the wooden barracks and hangars, arrived, turning it into the Shangri-la, the Forbidden Temple of black, or secret, aircraft.
Groom Lake is set inside 4,742 square miles of restricted airspace, and nearly four million acres of bomb range—a space as big as a Benelux nation. It would come to be called by many names: Groom Lake, Watertown, Paradise Ranch, Home Base, Area 51. But the name for the airspace above the lake and the secret test facility and base that would grow there was, irresistibly, “Dreamland.” It was this airspace that made it special, the airspace where strange craft appeared and disappeared like whims and suspicions, where speculations like airships glowed and hovered, then zipped off into the distance.
For years it had remained virtually unknown to the public that paid for it, its very existence denied by the government agencies and military contractors that ran it. It was illegal for those who worked inside to speak of it. And fighter pilots flying out of nearby Nellis Air Force Base were forbidden to cross into the Dreamland airspace. They called it “the Box,” and if they strayed into it they were interrogated and grounded.
The most famous planes known to have flown at Dreamland were those created by the legendary Lockheed Skunk Works, established by Kelly Johnson. Yet Johnson’s successor as the head of the Skunk Works, Ben Rich, told me shortly before his death in 1994, “I can’t even say ‘Groom Lake.’ ” To those in the know it was simply “the Ranch,” or “the remote location.”
A child of the Cold War, growing up fascinated with the mystique of aircraft, I knew the legend already: Here was where the U-2 first flew, and the SR-71 Blackbird and the F-117 Stealth fighter—all in secret. For years only a few grainy pictures of the place—taken surreptitiously from distant ridges or by satellites—served to prove its existence.
On the ridge above Dreamland, I would find I was not alone. Far from it. My fascination was shared by many others—airplane buffs, Skunkers, stealth chasers, Interceptors, like my friend Steve from Texas, like the journalist called the Minister of Words, guys with code names like Trader, Agent X, Zero, Bat, Fox, and others who gathered here, trying to find out about rumored, occasionally sighted, or speculated-upon planes called Aurora, Black Manta, Goldie, and “the mother ship.”
Here, too, I encountered the UFO buffs—“the youfers,” I would call them. By the late eighties, when a man named Bob Lazar emerged, claiming to have seen and worked on captured flying saucers, Area 51 had become one of the world’s best-known UFO shrines.
To some it was the battlefield where the Cold War had been won, an antiwar fought with antiweapons: spy planes like the U-2 that saved us in Cuba in October 1962, or the Blackbird that defused the superpower confrontation in the Mideast in 1973. To one veteran, perhaps cynical, observer of the Pentagon, it was the symbol of a black world run amok, a cult of secrecy grown obsessive, “a secret city,” “the last great preserve of cold warriors, a symbol for that wonderful secret world, a testament to how much fun it was to build hugely expensive planes and save the world.” To another watcher who was obsessed by all the strange craft in the air, it was a site where “we are flight-testing vehicles that defy description, things so far beyond comprehension as to be really alien to our way of thinking.”
To still others, Area 51 implied craft from beyond our planet, recovered in secrecy from desert crash sites or bequeathed in secret treaties with extraterrestrials—craft we were trying to learn how to fly ourselves. For some of the most extreme conspiracists, it was a place controlled by aliens: There had been a shoot-out, the darkest of the stories held, and the aliens who once dined side by side with earthlings in the base cafeteria were now in total control. Or perhaps, a final school argued, it was a place of the grandest deception, a shadowbox of saucer stories playing themselves out in a Punch-and-Judy performance designed to make us accept a final earthly tyranny.
Most of the flying saucers or mysterious lights were simply flares, the military argued, used to decoy missiles or illuminate targets at night, and it was plain that some were also landing lights seen through the distance of the rippling desert air. “Yeah, they are unidentified and they fly,” one skeptic told me, “and they are sent by a mysterious alien civilization—the Pentagon.”
But those watching for secret planes and those watching for alien craft appeared alike in their fascination and their procedures, in their careful accumulation of bits of knowledge, their descriptions of sightings, and, above all, their elusive dreams of a clear view, a clear video image, a clear photograph. “Mystery Aircraft,” a 1992 report by the Federation of American Scientists, had observed a striking similarity between the spotters of secret planes and the UFO watchers. The FAS was dedicated to investigating Pentagon waste and excessive military secrecy, but now it had crossed into a new realm of philosophy and cultural analysis to argue that “it is useful to consider mystery aircraft not simply as an engineering product, but also as a sociological and epistemological phenomenon.”
What had happened to Dreamland was a parable about knowledge and secrecy, about assembling facts and bits of information into a pattern, about learning and speculation. It was about what the Area 51 watcher known as PsychoSpy called “the nature of truth” but
was perhaps closer to the opposite: the absence of certain truth and the abundance of uncertain lore, legend, and just plain “rumint,” as the watchers on the Ridge liked to call it, echoing the military intelligence terms “photint,” for photographic, “elint” for electronic, and “humint” for human forms of intelligence. “The signal-to-noise ratio is very low here,” one stealth chaser told me. Or as Steve, the master Interceptor, put it in his Texas Panhandle locution, “It’s awful tough to pick the pepper out of the shit.”
It was about mystery engendering fantasy. It was like one of those empty spaces in the unexplored interiors of continents that medieval cartographers had imaginatively supplied with dragons and other monsters.
I had driven up from Las Vegas past the F-15s, F-16s, and B-1Bs landing and taking off at Nellis Air Force Base. A billboard for an upcoming air show at the base, sponsored by a large casino, promised “An American Dream Come True.” The desert seemed like low-res detail on a flight simulator game: RISC landscape. This was the country for which God made cruise control. If you kept your eyes on the horizon, you barely seemed to move, so slowly did the distant perspective change. You had to focus on the shoulder, with its blur of sage and silver mileposts, to sense any progress.
Sometimes on that shoulder, sometimes on the road in front, my humped cartoon shadow ran ahead and reminded me of the exaggerated shadows of lunar or Mars landers, taking their own silhouetted pictures on some distant dry surface. After miles of tilted slabs of stone, striated like nicely cooked bacon, the only green area was a shock. The Pahranagat Valley looked like a dark Gothic 1840s vision of heaven, full of funeral urns and weeping willows, Protestant hymns and early deaths from typhoid. With its shallow lakes dotted with birds, it offered the richest land for hundreds of miles around. In the nineteenth century, horse rustlers used it to fatten animals stolen in Nevada, California, Utah, and even Arizona.
