Dreamland

by Phil Patton

  On one trip to Tonopah, PsychoSpy hurled himself up against the chain-link fence and the guard quickly dropped to a crouch and focused his M-16. Usually you could josh with the guards, but all of sudden the casualness was gone. Everyone in the party was shocked.

  The guard had grown increasingly irritated. On their radios, the dudes referred to Campbell as “our friend” or “the editor.” Inevitably, he managed to get himself arrested. Accompanying yet another reporter and camera crew, he led the dudes on a chase that ended with the group pinned down by a sandblasting chopper, then cut off by one of the dude mobiles. When they asked for the film, PsychoSpy locked the doors of his Toyota. They finally forced him out and confiscated his film.

  He went to court, serving as his own attorney in a thirty-eight-dollar suit he bought at a Mormon thrift shop in Las Vegas. He argued that by not returning his film the dudes were in effect concealing evidence of a crime: They had flown the helicopter that sandblasted him below the five-hundred-foot FAA-mandated minimum altitude.

  It was all to no avail, as he knew it would be, and he was fined. His community service included working on a history of Rachel and helping out at the senior center.

  After Freedom Ridge was closed off in the spring of 1995, and perhaps finding his welcome in Rachel wearing thin, PsychoSpy rented an apartment in a complex in Las Vegas, near the airport. From his front window he could see the Janet flights taking off and landing on their way to and from Groom. He called this his “Las Vegas Research Center.” It was a characteristically defiant gesture.

  If he sometimes seemed smug, feeding off his appearances in the media even as he spoke disdainfully of its operations, he was better than anyone at cutting to key points about the base. Wrapping himself in his cloak of citizen advocate, he argued that the importance of the Lazar story was not the existence or nonexistence of UFOs in government hands. What mattered was that there could be. Policies of secrecy had made it possible, and those policies were in defiance of all-American moral law and tradition.

  PsychoSpy wrote that he—except he used the editorial or royal “we”—approached aliens-at-the-test-site stories “as folklore.” “Rather than assuming a story is false until proven true,” he stated in The Desert Rat, “we proceed as though it were true, collecting information about it until we reach an insurmountable roadblock or inconsistency.” No lie, he was confident, could “reproduce all the rich interconnections of reality.

  “As long as a story remains interesting in itself, like a well-constructed novel, we are willing to set aside the issue of truth and go along for the ride,” he added, sounding somewhat like Jung himself.

  The real problem was that the military and the government—or whatever conspiracy you wanted to postulate—had been able to establish enough secrecy to make the possibility of flying saucers at Area 51 vital for thousands of citizens. At Groom Lake, airplanes had been chopped up, burned, and buried; entire programs were erased from the record. They had kept the first spy satellite secret for more than thirty years and the National Reconnaissance Office, the organization that operated it, unacknowledged and virtually unknown for even longer. They had managed to hide the NRO’s “stealth building”—only feet from the strip mall and spec office parks around Dulles Airport—from Congress itself. They had kept secret for years the post-nuclear-war presidential redoubt in the basement of the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia. Excessive secrecy left the way open for—fairly demanded—all kinds of conspiratorial speculations. If nothing was seen, much would be dreamed.

  Lurking on the Internet, as on a high-elevation viewpoint, I saw Dreamland taking on a new, shadowy presence in cyberspace. Sometimes active pilots would appear. There were B-1B crews, chattering and bragging. A few days later they suddenly disappeared. I had the very firm impression that a higher-up had spotted the postings. The B-1 is known to airmen as “the Bone” and its crews, by extension, as “Bonemen,” if not “Boners,” men of camaraderie and enthusiasm who write poetry “on beer drinking, cannibalism, and such.” Perhaps the colonel was not pleased to read about a near-supersonic flight with live ordnance, as in a message headed “Lots o’ Iron”: “Yesterday, we were 500AGL, .998 Mach, very very near civilized establishments en route to the ft Sill IP with 84; live eggs on board—that, my friends, is the sound of freedom!”

  Soon enough, there were not only newsgroups about Dreamland, like alt.conspiracy.area51, but websites devoted to it. Glenn Campbell had previously learned that some mail to Area 51 was directed to “Pittman Station, Henderson.” Henderson is a town just east of Las Vegas, the site of a defunct post office that once received mail for the base. One buff plugged “Pittman Station” into the Alta Vista web searcher. It came back with a 1990 NASA press release listing astronaut candidates. Pittman Station was listed as the site of employment of a Capt. Carl E. Walz. Another buff then did a search for “Walz” and came up with a detailed NASA biography. You could read that Walz’s parents lived in South Euclid, Ohio, and that he had graduated from Charles T. Brush High School in Lyndhurst, Ohio. You could also find that “in July 1987 he was transferred to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he served as a Flight Test Program Manager at Detachment 3, Air Force Flight Test Center.” The Air Force Flight Test Center is located at Edwards Air Force Base, apparently with a detached unit at Groom Lake, with a Pittman Station mail drop: It appeared that Walz had worked in Dreamland. Had he flown Aurora? Been a test pilot for some other project? None of that was answered.

  Glenn drew it all together. Having previously established that AFFTC “has a presence at Groom … now we know that it is Detachment 3 that is housed there. This is consistent with the designation on the cover of the Area 51 Security Manual of ‘DET 3 SP,’ with ‘SP’ perhaps referring to ‘Security Police.’ ”

  You could magnify a little detail into a live connection. But you could also magnify rumor—and there were certainly frauds and weird entries. It was not always easy to recognize them, and even when you did, sometimes they were more interesting than the accurate postings.

  One man described his “grandpa,” who had worked, he said, at Area 51 or at Tonopah, he wasn’t sure which. The grandfather would never discuss his work, but when he was dying and had been “given Morphone and other asiditives [sic],” he finally talked. He had been given a “metal” for his work. After his death, “an onslought of Military personnel took the Metal, the Bodys and the licke” away.

  Another posting offered a chronology of runway expansions at the base that read like a parody of Tom Mahood’s painstaking chronologies of events at Groom or his biography of Bob Lazar. The name of the poster was suspicious to begin with: “Robert Harry Hover.” Is that “hover,” as in the way a saucer hangs?

  The detailed listing buzzed with numbers: runway lengths and elevations, magnetic bearings in degrees, minutes, and seconds. The startling and suggestive things are slipped in between the numbers so that you almost don’t notice their implications: “Only 70 Base Personnel knew of this place.” “1964 Anti-gravitation device test. Unsuccessful,” and the Delphi “1970 Occurrence Friday, September 11, at 10 PM for one-half hour.”

  A British UFO magazine published a photograph its editors believed depicted the Aurora refueling over the North Sea in formation with F-111s. Steve Douglass was suspicious. He made some phone calls, checked details of the aircraft types, even the engines, and proved it a hoax. But the hoax was intentional: The picture had been produced by Bill Rose, an astronomer and photographer, for the English magazine Astronomy Now, specifically to demonstrate how easy it was to fake photos of UFOs or secret airplanes. The UFO magazine had taken it from Astronomy Now without permission and, in effect, proved Rose’s point.

  Another time, Steve received an anonymous letter containing what the sender said were images of two hypersonic aircraft prototypes. The fuzzy photocopy showed two fighter-size aircraft said to be code-named “SANTA.” He discovered that the picture actually showed two prototype miniature deep-diving submarines designed and bu
ilt by an oceanographer named Graham Hawkes.

  The more cases like this you read about, the more time you spend on the perimeter, the more you tend to believe in the native human tendency to exaggerate, embroider, and deceive. There were apparently more nuts than were dreamed of in my philosophy at least. Dreamland expanded one’s sense of the native human tendency to duplicity—and to spite.

  One morning, a group of the Interceptors met near Indian Springs. The day’s hike was to the top of Mount Stirling, one of the few places from which you can glimpse—albeit from forty or fifty miles away—Papoose Lake and Lazar’s “S-4,” ostensible site of saucer test flights and hangars hidden inside cliffs.

  At the base of the trail, I met the Swiss Mountain Bat, the most distantly based of the Interceptors (he is in fact Swiss), in his rented Ford Explorer. The Bat had read a book called Above Top Secret, which recounted Lazar’s and other tales of secret facilities cut into cliffs and mountains and deserts in the western United States. The Bat did not find it so hard to believe in hangars inside cliffs at S-4, with door panels camouflaged as rock. An American might be dubious, but the Bat had done his three years in the Swiss military and seen all the underground hangars and command centers in a country whose laws require the provision of a bomb shelter beneath every newly constructed building. “We’ve done that all over the country,” cut into the mountains “like Swiss cheese,” he said with a big smile as we bounced up the Forest Service road.

  Sure enough, when he got back to Switzerland, the Bat mailed me photographs of some of the Swiss installations. They appeared as rocky cliffs at first glance, but on closer viewing you could pick up perceptible lines, as if discerning a servant’s door in the library of a gentleman’s mansion.

  He worked for an insurance company, but he seemed to live from one visit to Dreamland to another. He sold his photos of S-4 and Groom Lake to the UFO magazines. He appeared in many of the pictures and would show up on the covers of UFO magazines grinning behind his big camera lens and binoculars, in full camouflage. He regularly e-mailed the Interceptors back in the States from the Bat HQ, as he called his home. But he had another agenda, which was to prove that his country of chocolate bars and gold bars, clocks and banks and burghers, had UFOs too, and cover-ups.

  “It’s no longer about chocolate and cheese in our tiny li’l country now,” he crowed in his e-mails. “Very strange things go bump in deep night over here, too.” He told of mystery radar blips and lights.

  The Explorer bounced up the narrow road, but the hump between tracks was rising with the elevation. Soon we were almost straddling it. When we pulled to a stop, the sweet smell of burning sage and pinyon came from beneath the vehicle where plants had been scorched by the hot exhaust.

  During the steep climb, we kept our eyes on the ground, on droppings of various animals, on red lichens—the same color as Lazar’s element 115. PsychoSpy, wearing a porkpie hat from Kmart, breathed heavily. Tom Mahood, his eyes deep-set beneath an Aussie hat, led the way. “If they were serious,” he said as the vistas began to open occasionally through the trees, “Lazar and Huff should have come up here before they went public.” They could have brought a video camera and gotten some proof of the flights, taped the rising saucers. Now even Lazar thought the saucers had been moved.

  The top came suddenly. A turn and then a sweeping view from 8,200 feet; framed by pine boughs with their beads of sap visible like fresh rain, the lakes slid among the distant overlapping ranges. “There it is,” Mahood said. “The most secret place in America.”

  We sat and recovered and ate. I noticed with a start that the bags of trail mix and peanuts had swollen into little pillows at over 8,000 feet, transparent balloons.

  No one really believed he would see flying saucers, or even hangar doors. Nor were we here to disprove anything. It was the possibility that justified the trip. Possibility expanded our credulity.

  Maps were consulted. Mahood had marked the borders of the test site and range in fluorescent pink and orange and, with his engineer’s eye, had carefully worked out the sight lines from Mount Stirling to Papoose Lake and other vistas. He squatted on a folding canvas-and-metal stool and aligned his telescope.

  The test site spread out below: the geometric assemblage of Mercury, the company town where I remembered seeing ads in the cafeteria for bowling leagues. Highway 95 showed the silver slugs of trucks and the black flecks of cars. Near the entrance to the test site, you could see the holding pen where so many demonstrators had been sequestered over the years. To the east were the Ranger Mountains and a strip of public land. On an earlier trip, the Interceptors had tried to get up to the edge of the test site that way, but it was rougher and longer than it had looked, and some of them nearly collapsed for lack of water.

  You could see the stubs of towers where atomic blasts had been set off, Yucca Flat, Frenchman Flat, the barely visible Command Post and assembly buildings. I imagined what it would have been like to watch the atmospheric tests from up here, to see the mushroom clouds rising from the plains, to feel—half a minute, forty-five seconds later—the vast wave of shock and heat there amid the pines.

  But our attention was focused on the light strip of Papoose Lake. We should have been looking straight at the wall with the sand-colored doors of secret saucer hangars, pitched at a 30-degree angle, that Lazar had talked of. As the sun moved lower, the light molded the hills into fuller shapes. The landscape seemed to puff up and grow fuller, more sculpted, as if inflating like our little bags of food.

  “That would be the way to walk in,” Mahood said. “Up Nye Canyon, across Frenchman Flat.”

  To the far right you could see the airfield at Indian Springs with its little x of runways half-flattened like a folding chair from the perspective. We saw a light aircraft pass by. Then someone caught sight of what looked like a building, a blockhouse-like structure, beyond the edge of the test site.

  “As the afternoon wore on, they could see more and more,” someone intoned in the voice of a television narrator. The whole experience of Interceptordom was cast by the way they figured in TV interviews.

  The Swiss Mountain Bat jumped. With the light shifting, he could see the mystery building in his viewfinder. He steadied the huge telephoto lens and delightedly snapped away.

  The shadows lengthened. All of a sudden a dark shape came hurtling down from the right of our camp: a great bird, concentrating on its prey, surprised to find us here. I could see its stunned look, and as it pulled up then banked away down the slope, the bird—it was a golden eagle—lost a single white feather. The down feather drifted slowly, like a parachute flare, until it landed in the bushes, and Mahood scrambled to retrieve it.

  That night, back on the plain beneath Mount Stirling, we camped and built a fire of the pitiful gatherings of twisted driftwood-like pinyon and the odd two-by-four someone had left—and talked of Lazar’s shady past and proton cannons and skyquakes. The campfire carved out a cave of light, and lore and jokes flew back and forth as the mesquite burned longer than the thin, twisted sticks seemed to have a right to do. This was the closest we got, I figured, to ghost stories or the primal folktale.

  Tom Mahood talked of a guy who claimed to have worked on flying saucer simulators, of a man who knew the man who did the ejection seat for the Blackbird and then for the Aurora. “My rational mind says that what you see is all there is,” he said, “but another part of me wants to believe there’s something else out there.”

  This from an engineer, an exacting thinker and researcher—yet from the beginning Mahood was drawn to Lazar’s story. For all his just-the-facts-ma’am attitude, he admitted he had initially felt that Lazar was telling the truth, that he had been at S-4. Lazar’s very presence seemed to have this convincing effect on people, his sense of self-possession, almost diffidence. Mahood continued to feel that way even as more and more information seemed to discredit Lazar’s claims about his résumé and career. But the emotional link remained. For a time, it gave him restless nights.
Like many, Mahood wanted to believe; the wild hopes and cosmic dreams of his heart struggled with his engineer’s head. As if in a Pascalian leap into faith, even the most remote of chances that the revelations were true provided a tempting counterbalance to the weight of facts against them.

  The darkness was profound. I lay on my back in the sleeping bag and saw the Milky Way not as a collection of stars but as a smear. My eye went to Orion, the first constellation I had learned at the planetarium in second grade. Zeta Reticuli, putative source of flying saucers, was visible in Cygnus, someone had told me, but only in the Southern Hemisphere. All at once a single meteorite streaked through the Little Dipper. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself.

  Driving back to Las Vegas the next morning, I thought about the shadows around the campfire. They suggested to me Plato’s cave, as updated by the class cut-up who shapes his fingers into a rabbit or duck by flashing them in the beam of the film-strip projector. Ordinary realities, kept out of sight, turn into flickering monsters on the cave wall. Captured foreign fighters become alien spaceships; nuclear test tunnels turn into a network of secret underground chambers; radar test shapes on stalks are transformed into saucers hovering above apertures to the underworld.

  A few weeks after the hike, Tom Mahood returned to the top of Mount Stirling. With a different telescope, by different light, he was sure that the mysterious building we had seen was nothing more than a rock formation.

  14. Black Manta

  Dreamland spun me out again, this time to Amarillo, home of the famed Cadillac Ranch, where old Caddies are buried up to their tail fins, and whose name always reminds me of “Paradise Ranch.” Tracking the evolution of the tail fin, which was inspired by the fins on Kelly Johnson’s P-38 and the rocket fins of the late fifties, I understood it as a monument to a society in which El Dorado is no longer a mythical gold city but a Cadillac coupe with a vinyl top and gold-anodized brightwork installed at the dealership.