by Phil Patton
I came here to meet Steve Douglass. Although he rarely ventured to the perimeter of Dreamland, he came to be venerated as the ur-Interceptor, a near legendary figure. He was a military monitor, an interceptor of radio broadcasts, and if anyone knew what was flying, he did.
Beavis and Butt-head snickered on the TV in the living room of Steve’s ranch-style home. Then Steve popped a tape into the VCR and the boys disappeared into a powdery mix of colors. There was a silence, then solid gray-blue; then a dot emerged, grew larger, became a bat, a ray-shaped airplane swooping overhead—and finally the image dissolved into gray grit. Steve flicked the set off. “Seven seconds,” he said. “You live for those moments. You listen all those hours for that kind of gold nugget.”
Steve felt sure he had captured the TR3A Black Manta on video for the very first time.
Once a year, something like Brigadoon, the long-closed base at Roswell came alive with dozens of aircraft, in April or May, on the occasion of the annual Roving Sands air exercise, which involves hundreds of airplanes and airspace over five states. For Steve and, later, other Interceptors, Roving Sands was the Olympics of plane spotting.
Trying to spot something unusual meant spending hours standing in the back of a pickup truck, listening to scanners and watching the distant horizons. Most of the planes were familiar ones, but every so often something strange would appear, usually at dusk. In May 1993, Steve had gone black-plane hunting there with Elwood Johnston, his father-in-law and fellow stealthy. Steve had always had good luck finding mysterious flying objects when Elwood was along; he believed Elwood was a stealth lure.
At the end of the day, Elwood saw it first. “What’s that?” Then they both found it on the horizon in the dusk. He was sure it was not an F-117; it was slower, with a different sound, a different shape. Douglass’s radio scanner crackled, the numbers churned on its readout. As he raised his video camera, the battery warning light flashed. He grabbed seven seconds of video before the machine snapped off.
When he got home, Douglass printed an enhanced view of the bat plane. Then, consulting with his wide network of experts in the industry, the aviation press, and the military, he tweaked the details to create a speculative image of the airplane.
It looked like the airplane that the Greenpeace intruders had spotted when they ventured across the Dreamland perimeter in 1986. It had been speculated on as far back as 1990 by the mysterious figure who signed himself “J. Jones,” an insider reporting on stealth. The accepted wisdom among stealth chasers and Interceptors was that the Black Manta operated in tandem with the F-117A Stealth fighter, relaying target information, and evidence suggested it had been used in the Gulf War.
The TR3A would likely have first flown from Groom Lake, and something like it had been seen often near Dreamland. In 1993, Agent X had been startled to see a batlike craft sailing right over the highway near Alamo, a little town of two motels and a diner southeast of the perimeter. Even the radio host Art Bell had spotted a two-hundred-foot hovering triangle near his home in Pahrump, west of Dreamland. And what about the two sightings, west and east of the restricted area, of triangular craft in company with F-117s, in February and November of 1995?
Was the TR3A a descendant of the Theater High Altitude Penetrator (THAP), an airplane made public by Northrop in the late 1970s? In 1980 both THAP—which seemed to be Northrop’s consolation prize in the original stealth competition—and the Lockheed Have Blue programs were classified Special Access Programs, and very little additional information about them emerged. But in 1983, defense industry insiders reported that Northrop had gotten a contract for twenty-five or so aircraft. In November 1987, Steve learned of a crash of a plane “not an F-117.”
Was it the same craft involved in the September 26, 1994, Boscombe Down crash in the United Kingdom? Was it the craft that crashed on October 18, 1994, at Kirtland AFB? Steve picked up the radio traffic from the crash recovery team, which referred to returning the wreckage of “a high-altitude research aircraft” to Edwards.
Douglass’s printout of the TR3A looks, at first glance, like a flying saucer.
Steve leads me into his thickly carpeted retreat, where six scanners work steadily, hopping from channel to channel—shortwave, VHF, UHF, sideband—all feeding into a little voice-activated Radio Shack tape recorder that vacuums up every scrap of voice, packing a day’s talk into ninety minutes or so, which Douglass listens to late at night. He grows restless without a scanner nearby, the bubbling reassurance of its red digits pumping frequencies through its chips and extruding slugs of conversation. Talk with him on the phone, and you have to get used to sudden soft pauses, as if there were a fault in the line, as he cocks his other ear toward something on one of the radios.
Airplane models hang from the ceiling; pictures of planes line the walls. In one corner lurks a huge oscilloscope—military surplus—and a Hallicrafter’s shortwave set, packed with tubes, picked up for twenty-five dollars at a garage sale. There are maps of military bases and of New Mexico, as well as a Landsat photo of the F-117 base at Tonopah. Red and blue lines show main air routes and refueling courses. Amarillo is dead center in the heart of the country’s military flyways. “Why go to Groom Lake,” Steve asks, “when the planes seem to come to you?” Steve has had Stealth fighters fly right over the house.
Steve loads the taped radio clips from the White Sands episode onto Soundscan files on his Performa 450 computer. Now he clicks on each little folder on the screen. Maintenance and security people talk about the arrival of a VIP in the morning. (Later, Douglass learns that Gen. Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had visited El Paso the day before. He suspects Powell might have made an unpublicized side trip for a glimpse of the Black Manta.) The radio traffic refers to the plane as an “STF.” Does that stand for Stealth or Survivable Tactical Fighter? Another report has it as “Tactical Survivable Aircraft” and ties its lineage to the Northrop THAP of earlier years.
At the history office at Edwards Air Force Base, I find that the TR3A is included among the aircraft types index, along with the F-15 and the SR-71. But the only materials in the file are press clips, not the flight test reports and other documents provided for other aircraft.
On March 23, 1992, Steve picked up radio traffic between two unidentified craft using the call signs Darkstar November and Darkstar Mike. He realized they were flying close by. Then the house began to shake, and the window frames rattled. He ran out of his house, slapping film into his Canon AE-1. He could hear the rumbling sound of the engine—like a rocket engine, only intermittent—in regular bursts. He could even feel it in his chest, but all he saw of the craft itself was “a silver glint of light, a metallic shape.” Even with a 400mm telephoto lens he managed to capture only the plane’s contrail—a string of roundish puffs, the now-well-known “doughnut-on-a-rope.”
About a month later, he got a report from one of his Interceptor informants in the high desert area of California of communications between “Joshua control” and an aircraft calling itself “Gaspipe.” He and other watchers thought it was the spoor of a new kind of engine, a secret aircraft’s pulser jet. Within weeks it was published in Aviation Week.
Later, Steve talked by phone with a pulse-jet engine expert he knows at a military contractor. The engineer played chords on a synthesizer over the phone, striking lower and lower frequencies until Douglass found the one he had heard. “Damn,” the engineer said, recognizing that his rivals had perfected an advanced jet engine, “they’ve done it.”
Steve Douglass grew up in the West, and one of his earliest memories is of going up into the mountains to watch in the distance a nuclear explosion in Nevada. He recalls how beautiful it was, how it lit up the sky like a rosy sunset.
He was a photographer for the newspaper in Amarillo when he bought his first scanner. It was a simple model for following the police and fire bands, so he could rush to the scene of a car accident or warehouse conflagration to snap pictures for the paper. The more he lis
tened, the more he wondered what else was on the air. “It was like the old George Carlin bit,” he says, “ ‘What’s on beyond the edge of the dial, after the knob stops?’ What are they hiding out there?”
What he discovered was the new world of scanners. Around 1970, solid-state electronics had replaced old crystals as the heart of scanners. Before long, you could buy a 200-channel scanner from Radio Shack for about three hundred dollars. Radio Shack has sold more than four million 2006 scanners worldwide, and in theory anyone who knows how to use one can eavesdrop on most military traffic, on Air Force One itself. Steve figured there were probably no more than five hundred hard-core military monitors in this country, which may simply mean people who have nothing better to do with their time.
Some systems hop from channel to channel to defeat eavesdroppers, but the best of the new equipment can cover thousands of channels a second and listen in on the channel-hoppers too. Encryption is used at high-level bases, but it’s expensive and vulnerable to atmospheric shifts. Even at Groom Lake, the camou dudes broadcast in the open, most of the time.
Steve bought more powerful scanners and eventually found all sorts of strange things beyond the end of the dial. He began picking up the military channels, and as a stringer he fed bits of information to the Associated Press. His first scoop came in 1986, when he picked up transmissions from a Soviet nuclear sub with a critical nuclear reactor problem. In an early sign of détente, U.S. Navy ships had rushed to the scene to help out. The Pentagon denied the story, but when an A.P. reporter brought in Douglass’s tape, on which a sailor screams, “It’s sinking! It’s going down! Radiation counters are going up!” the military finally admitted what was going on. Television cameras were present when American ships rescued the Soviet crew.
Douglass heard the troops assembling to invade Grenada, then Panama. During the Gulf War, he fed network reporters shortwave accounts of SCUD launchings from troops in Saudi Arabia before their Israeli bureaus heard the sirens.
Once, he monitored the radio traffic surrounding the crash of a B-1B bomber. The airplane had smashed into a mountainside, and the Air Force was blaming the pilot. Investigators turned up at the pilot’s father’s house, asking if his son was a homosexual or a drug abuser. Congress was considering further funding for the B-1B, and the Air Force wanted nothing said that could pin fault on the airplane. Douglass, after hearing of the crash, checked his scanner tape from the night before. It clearly recorded the pilot complaining of problems with the plane’s autopilot. When the news came out, the military brass denied that any “amateur ham-radio operator” could have such information. The father of the dead pilot called Steve, and Steve was able to tell him the truth.
Steve and his wife, Teresa, an artist and computer whiz, began to publish a newsletter for military monitors called Intercepts. It was the first publication that tied together the far-flung watchers, who were conscious of being, well, outside of the mainstream, and it gave them a sense of the others out there. In the pages of Intercepts Douglass ran letters and columns above the code names of correspondents: Darkstar November, Big Red, Lone Star, Ghostrider. Douglass soon had subscribers at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and throughout the military.
He established his own dial-up bulletin board, which bubbled away on an old Commodore 128 in his Bat Cave, and then began operating a forum on America Online called Above Top Secret, later Project Black. His book, The Comprehensive Guide to Military Monitoring, would become the bible of the subject in which he shares tricks, frequencies, and some of the wonderful American music of call signs and radio vocabulary.
On the Net, Steve saw that many stealth chasers were meeting each other for the first time. On-line had become a clearinghouse for monitors to share military intelligence—“a public intelligence network,” he termed it. Before “It’s true, I saw it on the Internet” became a joke, Steve saw clues and rumors blossom on-line.
One day, men in suits began to appear in the windows of the long-vacant house behind Steve and Teresa’s place, and a bug showed up on his phone. The cellular phone of the local congressman had been tapped and recorded, and Douglass was suspected. The real culprit was later found, but Douglass now sweeps for bugs monthly.
Military monitoring has been called “ham radio cubed” or “super ham,” and the scoops monitors provide are often described disdainfully as “ham radio reports,” Steve told me. But monitoring is a whole different culture from that of ham radio operators. “Hams look down on monitors,” he said. “Hams say, ‘You can only listen?’ ” The monitoring culture is actually more closely related to the nation’s brief infatuation in the mid-seventies with CB radio. Motorists listened to CB to find out what the police were doing; many then graduated to police scanners, which let them listen in on the police directly. Steve, too, played around with CB until “the idiots all got on.”
Steve established good contacts in the military and defense industries, and he was constantly hanging around bases and watching exercises. Once he chatted with a Stealth fighter pilot at an air show. “How does flying the F-117 compare to the TR3A?” Steve asked him.
“Well, you see …” the pilot began. “Huh? Well, I can’t talk about that.”
In 1995, Steve spotted what he thought was another new aircraft near Cannon Air Force Base. He called it “artichoke,” for the pointed, overlapping shapes of its trailing edge. It was light gray and about the size of an F-111. He noticed that the military had opened a new Military Operating Area—a MOA—not far from where he had spotted the so-called artichoke. Another year, Steve spotted lights hovering above the runway at the White Sands base, then zipping off—the classic flying saucer flight pattern. But from the radio traffic, he speculated that this might be another secret craft—a Harrier-like vertical-takeoff-and-landing fighter.
Steve noted other sightings, some of them halfway around the world. In September 1994, reports surfaced in the United Kingdom of a mysterious aircraft crash-landing at Boscombe Down, the U.K.’s own version of Dreamland. The British had been testing at least one craft in Dreamland, the evidence suggested, but this was likely an American plane.
The front landing gear, it seemed, had failed, and observers spotted the strange shape, with inward-canting tail fins, partly covered by a tarpaulin. According to one theory it was a spin-off of Northrop’s YF-23, which competed unsuccessfully with Lockheed-Boeing’s YF-22 to replace the F-15. Some believed it was called ASTRA, for Advanced Stealth Technology Reconnaissance Aircraft, built by Northrop and McDonnell Douglas. Some believed the charcoal gray airplane was the A-17, a replacement for the F-111. Radio intercepts referred to it as AV-6 (Air Vehicle Six, its construction number), with USAF serial number 90-2414 and the call sign Blackbuck 11.
The C-5 that came to retrieve it was referred to by the call sign “Lance 18,” with the intended destination code of KPMD—air controller designation for the airport at Palmdale, California, home of Northrop and Lockheed. Within days, there was another accident involving a similar plane in New Mexico. To Steve that suggested some structural problem: Had the same part failed after the same length of time and stress?
In the spring of 1994, I headed out one evening at dusk to watch the Roving Sands exercises in Roswell. Across from the base, in front of a neat little house, a tiny Hispanic woman was tenderly washing her husband’s highway patrol car. The landscape on one side of the road was the stuff of sport-utility ads or Technicolor Westerns, with barbed-wire cattle fences and a decaying windmill for punctuation. On the other side, it was action thriller: chain-link fence topped with accordion wire.
While Steve kept his video camera focused upward, I found my eyes wandering to the ground. Even when passing directly overhead, fighters did not seem to be moving at astonishing speed until you stood back and watched the first appearance of their shadows, then the black wave racing toward you across dry grass.
At night, it is harder to see. There is a certain phenomenology with regard to night visions, the green, teeming
imagery familiar from crime and war footage, but to the unaided eye, the lights of the most mundane craft could grow surreal. Far off in the Hollywood Western sky, a Navy fighter returning to base was just a grain of red. But then it defined itself, stronger, like a laser, before innocently resolving into two wing-tip lights as it came in to land.
Standing on the fence line, waiting for flying objects we could identity, Steve and I had time to contemplate the appearances of UFOs. “Why don’t they come as clouds,” I asked, “so they blend in?”
“Why don’t they come disguised as Golden Arches,” Steve replied, “so they can land wherever they want and not be noticed?”
“What if they’re unofficial, not authorized? We always assume they’re here doing research, but what if they’re not part of some E.T. NASA, but just teenagers out cruising?”
“Joyriders,” Steve said. “Heck, low riders.”
Sometimes, Steve told me, he used his scanners to pick up tornado sightings and went off chasing them. “You know,” he said, “trailer parks cause tornadoes. It’s a scientific fact.”
“And maybe deserts cause UFOs? How come they never land in the parking lots of New Jersey malls?”
Or was it military bases and secret research facilities that spawned saucers? Were they there, as in the famed reports of snooping UFOs at Malmstrom and Kirtland Air Force bases, to spy on us? Or was it the presence of all that strange and frightening weaponry that put people in a frame of mind to see discs and lights?
Glenn Campbell came down for one edition of Roving Sands, and Steve was stunned to hear the security forces speak of him on the radio. “PsychoSpy is here,” they said. Campbell thought it was a joke at first, but it startled and perhaps frightened him. That year, too, a SEAL unit was assigned to patrol the Roswell base perimeter. Steve and the others watched a helicopter drop off several shadowy figures. The strange thing wasn’t that they were black, but that they were silent. Steve could hear cars on the road a couple of miles away, but no sound from the helicopter engines.
