by Phil Patton
Once, some of the Interceptors arranged to take a tour of the Nevada Test Site with Derek as their guide. They were taken to the Command Post, with those Naugahyde chairs, the long oval tables, the maps and video screens, and given box lunches. Derek seemed in a hurry to get them into the post, although there was nothing in particular happening, no special event. Only later did it strike Bill Sweetman that they had been carefully kept inside so that they would not see something flying overhead. When he asked Derek, “What kind of pumpkins would we have turned into if we had been outside at noon?” Derek was sheepish.
After the tour, they drove all the way down to Los Angeles and crashed at the Minister’s place in the Hollywood Hills in the wee hours of the morning—only to be tossed awake a couple of hours later by the big L.A. earthquake.
The demographics of the Interceptors tended to overlap those of engineers, as the test site overlapped Dreamland. The techie connection brought with it a cynicism that resembled the mercurial charge of a semiconductor. It faded in and out, suspended possibility and speculation like a force field.
The group pursued knowledge by the accumulative and comparative methods of any good intelligence agency. For the Interceptors, simply laying out the known and marking where the unknown began—patrolling the perimeter, so to speak—was enough. Some compiled elaborate grids and tables recording information about sightings, crashes, types of aircraft known and suspected, sometimes right down to tail numbers. In this they had much in common with obsessives anywhere on the planet.
If the Interceptors parodied the CIA’s assemblage of information from bits and pieces, they also parodied its surrogate identities and the cult and camaraderie of secret military units. They took on alter egos, in the manner of blues musicians or gangsters, with names to match, mostly e-mail nicknames. The alter egos both resembled and mocked cover names of the UFO informants “Condor” or “Falcon.” They created insignia—pins and patches—as if they were a real military unit. They developed their own personal subset of the Lore.
“It’s about two and a half Tikaboos,” an Interceptor would say. “But how far is it LeBaronable?” the response would come, the rented Chrysler convertible favored by Agent X lending a mobility standard for the dirt roads in the area.
One of PsychoSpy’s sources declared that the aliens had bequeathed technology to humans through Hungarians—atomic physicists Leo Szilard and Edward Teller, aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán, weren’t they all Hungarian? And the aliens spoke a language like High Hungarian. This was a twist on an old joke from the Manhattan Project, when someone noted how many Hungarians stood among the top ranks of the project scientists—and how strange their Magyar tongue was. They must be from Mars! The joke delighted the Interceptors, and they enjoyed adding details to it. Visiting Budapest, Glenn Campbell found more than four hundred Lazars listed in the phone book.
Agent Zero had special decoder rings machined up that purported to translate Hungarian into English. They were made of titanium, just as the Blackbirds were, then anodized in a special secret fluid to lend them a silver-blue sheen that seemed to me to reflect the whole happy glitzy fascination with Area 51. The special secret fluid was Coca-Cola.
It was like putting together a mosaic, John Andrews had said, and mosaic was just what the military feared, how they justified concealing the smallest detail. Mosaic was right in another way: Mosaic was the name of the first browser program for the World Wide Web. The information Interceptors gathered found its most natural home on the Internet, in alt.conspiracy.area51, the Skunk Works digest, and, later, on elaborate Web pages.
It turned a lot of watchers into philosophers. A Washington State journalist named Terry Hansen published his musings on the Internet under the title “The Philosophy of Dreamland,” taking an epigraph from Jim Morrison (“On the perimeter, there are no stars”). “So set aside your heartfelt prejudices and incredulity for the moment,” Hansen intoned, “and come along on an epistemological adventure into the tangled and shadowy jungle of officially forbidden knowledge. Here, rational analysis can no longer be considered a reliable guide. This is a realm ruled by the high priests of the intelligence community who simply do not like us poking our noses into their business, even though we’re footing the bill for it … Any hopes for certainty must be left behind at the outer boundaries of consensus reality, for we are about to explore the enigma of Dreamland.”
As high-technology shrine or secret saucer base, Area 51 took on an existence on-line as a virtual place, a “notional” country. The buffs were rebuilding Dreamland on-line in HTML and reverse-engineering it in data.
It was Vannevar Bush, the very man reputed to have been head of the secret Majestic, or MJ-12, group, who first laid out the vision of the personal computer and its new ways of organizing information. In July 1945, in a celebrated article in the Atlantic called “As We May Think,” Bush described his vision of the Memex, a personal memory or information device. In the process, he projected something that sounds like CD-ROM and the Internet. Bush’s ideas would inspire those who created the personal computer and the Internet, people like Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, who read the Atlantic article in a straw hut in the South Pacific when he was in the military. Bush believed that the human mind operated less by classification and organization, the traditional view of thought, than by association. “With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thought, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of the trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.”
Bush had predicted, “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the Memex and there amplified.” He predicted the rise of a special profession of innovator to mark such trails and distribute them to individual Memex machines, “a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.” This anticipated the strategy of the Interceptors. They were trailblazers to documents and information of an unusual or speculative nature.
The assemblage of extremely detailed and factual studies, notes the historian Richard Hofstadter, looking back over American history in the light of McCarthyism, has long been characteristic of conspiracist groups. From these sometimes rickety, jerry-built edifices of fact, the great leap to a wider conclusion is made—a leap of suspicion that is the dark side of a leap of faith. The information the Interceptors would assemble in time lines and lists and collections was like nothing so much as a conspiracist assemblage. But not everyone was willing to climb to the top and make the leap they had prepared.
The Interceptors knew something was happening when they showed up in the movies. The 1996 film Broken Arrow contained a reference to “the guys in lawn chairs just watching for something to take off.” In the film, a bomber and a nuke go astray, and the first official instinct is to cover it all up, keep it secret. But, a young aide warns, “Don’t forget the guys in lawn chairs” watching all the bases, who will notice a bomber leave and not return. Area 51 had crept into the mainstream of popular culture with a speed that surprised even the hardiest Interceptors.
The de facto leader of the Interceptors’ Nevada branch, Glenn Campbell, aka PsychoSpy, aka the Desert Rat, aka “not the singer,” was a controversial figure in the town of Rachel. He irked some locals by failing to commit clearly on the UFO question, and some Interceptors were dismayed by his limited interest in secret aircraft. The saucers were taken as certainty by the Travises and Chuck Clark. It was popular among the Interceptors to see Clark as Campbell’s opposite, and to view PsychoSpy’s Research Center and the Inn where the Travises and Clark held forth as two poles, one honest and inquiring, the other opportunistic and mercenary. But it was not so simple: They seemed to be distorted reflections of each other rather than o
pposites. Campbell’s patch and guide were also commercial enterprises, and Clark’s efforts were certainly philosophical. Campbell needed the black aircraft that bored him; Clark and the Travises, playing out their interview roles over and over, had come to need the saucers. One sometime resident compared them to the two drug connections rumored to be found at either end of town, competing with each other in the sale of crystal meth, a popular antidote to desert ennui.
But if he figured as the Hamlet of the hamlet of Rachel, Campbell was also the village explainer, laying out the mythologies, systematizing the lore. Glenn Campbell was the closest thing in Rachel to Joseph Campbell. In his role as PsychoSpy, he was drawn to the tales as parables.
In one tale, he was lying in the backseat of his car parked along Mailbox Road when he first saw them: strange spaceships, dotted with lights, hovering. They flew right over the car. It was only later, after thinking about the vivid memories he had had, that he realized he had been lying in a position from which he could not have seen ships overhead. He used the story as an example of how easy it was to delude yourself into thinking you had seen something you had not, how tricky the business of seeing things in the sky near the Black Mailbox was.
Campbell dressed in camou outfits bought at Hahn’s Surplus in Las Vegas and talked a lot about his selection of MREs—“meals ready to eat,” latter-day K-rations. Sometimes he suggested a grown-up version of the kid in your neighborhood who wanted to play soldiers all the time.
He said that he was not a UFO buff or Stealth fan but a philosopher and inquirer into the nature of truth. His business card read, “Area 51 Research Center. UFOs—Gov’t Secrets—Philosophy—Psychology etc.” He would make himself the chief researcher into Area 51, an advocate against secrecy, an extremely useful talking head for television crews, and a spy. “I am spying,” he would say, “on behalf of the American people.”
He had quickly run afoul of Joe and Pat Travis and been exiled to a trailer at the other end of town. The story going around was that Joe, drunk one night, had burst into the trailer and put a gun to Glenn’s head. Campbell’s story was that Joe had come in “in a drunken rage” and accused him of killing the Inn’s business.
Before I came to Nevada, Steve Douglass had told me about PsychoSpy. I phoned and Campbell sent me a copy of his Area 51 Viewer’s Guide. It compared well with the better travel guides to Europe. The very idea that someone had created a travel guide to a place that did not officially exist was exquisitely appealing to all of us fascinated by Dreamland. In his write-up of the Guide for the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy and Government Bulletin, Steve Aftergood praised “its deliberate epistemological murkiness.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Campbell scrawled on the cover of the copy he sent me. Did I seem naïve? Had he marked me as a skeptic? It was the first sign of his tendency—useful for dealing with the press—to chose his words carefully to match his audience.
I first met him at the trailhead to Freedom Ridge. He was standing beside his battered subcompact car, still with Massachusetts plates and covered with dozens of little stickers from places he had visited. We gave each other a look. I think his was suspicious. I know mine was. I wanted to like him, but from that first moment at the trailhead I had found it difficult to warm to him. The Minister, another Interceptor, suggested that he was trying to overcome his basic shyness in that diffident way shy people often assume. He often had the air of a hired guide, the park ranger of Dreamland, but in time I came to think of him as a jester and as, in that grand American locution, a gadfly. A philosopher, a naturalist of the unnatural, he sometimes suggested a parodic Thoreau, with Groom Dry Lake as his Walden Pond.
If you were simplifying the story of Dreamland for a TV movie, and needed to combine all the Interceptors into one character, Campbell might be that character. He gave good sound bites to the visiting syndicated TV shows, varying his tone, patiently doing retakes. In PsychoSpy, producers could imagine all the Interceptors’ modes and dreams wrapped up in this one guy.
Campbell had established what he called “the Whitesides Defense Council,” to fight the military’s takeover of the viewpoints there and on Freedom Ridge, and then “the Secrecy Oversight Council.” He skillfully tapped into the skepticism toward the federal government, one of the few common bonds among Nevadans, and established a middle ground between political right and left, and between the youfers and stealthies who wanted to break down the walls of what they deemed unnecessary government secrecy. He named the ridge he had discovered Freedom Ridge, because who could be against freedom?
Nevadans have long resented federal ownership of the vast majority of their lands, even though the feds pump billions of dollars into the state economy through the military, the DOE, and other agencies. What Mark Twain wrote in Roughing It about nineteenth-century Nevadans pretty much holds true today. When they finally achieved statehood, Twain said, “The people were glad to have a legitimately constituted government, but did not particularly enjoy having strangers from distant states put in authority over them—a sentiment that was natural enough.”
Soon Campbell began distributing a newsletter called The Desert Rat by mail and on the Net. He reported on hearings, arrests of perimeter crossers, and Area 51 rumor and lore. He told of strange characters that appeared in Rachel, like Ambassador Merlyn Merlin II from the planet Draconis, who said he was a “being of Light” (although, PsychoSpy editorialized, “we touched him and found him to be quite solid”). Merlin was on a mission to promote the coming “Golden Age,” when the aliens would be integrated into our society and we humans would evolve into a higher form. Campbell came up with an odd source from within the test site: Jarod, who claimed to have worked on “flight simulators” for the alien craft hidden at S-4.
Campbell kept showing up at hearings and working the media, irritating the hell out of the military and the Lincoln County sheriff’s department. And he fought the BLM’s efforts to seize more land by demanding that the Air Force explain why it needed the land, what it was doing in Dreamland. He bent a classic bureaucratic catch-22 back on itself: The government needed the land to keep secret what it was doing on the base, but because what it was doing was secret it could not explain why it needed the land.
Campbell rightly understood that the hardest thing for the military to deal with was derision. His best line was his response to the signs on the perimeter and the apparatus of secrecy they stood for: “Use of deadly farce authorized.”
Glenn Campbell and Jim Goodall designed their own version of a uniform patch for the workers at Groom. It portrayed an Aurora-like craft sweeping up from a dry lake with mountains behind it, and the words “Dreamland Groom Lake Test Site.” Soon we heard the patch was for sale at a store in the Pentagon mall. Glenn did not hesitate to print it up on T-shirts and caps and sell it through his catalog and in his “Research Center.” Then it was reproduced in several magazines as if it were official, as if it were actually worn by the camou dudes and others inside the base.
A year or so later I was in Nevada again. I phoned Glenn from Las Vegas. “Well,” he said, “I’ll have to be in the Research Center all day.” This tone of pressing business was new.
The Research Center was Glenn’s trailer, at the south end of Rachel, and I knew it well. “I’ve never seen the Research Center,” I said, trying to keep the archness out of my voice.
When I pulled up to the little trailer, I noticed junk outside—a cow skull, with bits of skin and hair still clinging to it, and some old aircraft parts. Inside on the ceiling was a large map of Dreamland and surrounding airspace, and a big new Macintosh sat on a table. On the wall was a quotation from anthropologist Margaret Mead about how a few people with conviction can change the world. On the floor were strewn old socks.
Secret aircraft interested Campbell barely at all. He had once said that if the legendary Aurora landed in front of him, taxied up, and ran over his foot, he would pay it no attention.
He han
ded me an article called “Effects of UFOs upon Human Beings.” It dealt with odd electrical effects—radio static, flashing lights—such as those seen in the pickup truck scene in Close Encounters. I noticed that the author was named “McCampbell,” and the similarity made me wonder if this guy was not some kind of doppelgänger of Glenn’s, what he wished he could be—if only he could believe. It was a measured, mostly scientific report on radio interference, sunburn effects, electrical shorts, and other phenomena reported by those who had encountered UFOs.
There were those who believed Campbell was a closet youfer, but he became increasingly skeptical of Lazar. Gene Huff, Lazar’s pal, took to calling Campbell “Goober” on-line. “He tends to alienate people,” said Huff. “He’s a strange bird, a weird guy. He told me he moved out here because of the Bob Lazar story, and now he attacks Bob. I call his operation the UFO division of the Mickey Mouse Club. It may be fine for the shitkickers and dickheads in Rachel, but not for the rest of the world.”
Campbell had alienated Huff by publishing transcripts of Lazar’s statements at the Ultimate UFO Conference in Rachel, when Huff believed that he was the only one with the right to do so. Huff took a kind of pride in defending Lazar. He made Campbell a particular target, hinting darkly of immoral, even criminal behavior in his background. The word among the Interceptors was that each had something on the other. Campbell had negative information on Lazar’s credibility; Huff had info on Campbell. It was a parody of MAD, mutual assured destruction, so neither could use the stories, even if they were true. “Well,” Steve Douglass remarked wryly when he heard of these supposed skeletons, “I guess we all have our little Groom Lakes.”
Campbell made life difficult for the Air Force by challenging its takeover of additional land, including the Freedom Ridge overlooks. But his whole media act as “searcher for the nature of truth” was as pretentious as his dressing in camou gear and eating MREs.
