by Phil Patton
The first official squadron of Air Force UAVs, I learned, the Eleventh Reconnaissance Squadron, commanded by Col. Steven L. Hampton, was already taking shape at Indian Springs. This, by happy chance, was also where Bob Lazar was debriefed. It was one of the places where legend said saucer wreckage was stored.
How many UFOs were UAVs? I still couldn’t say, nor could anyone. But the Air Force was about to give confirmation of the existence of one of the strangest shapes that had ever been spotted in Dreamland.
19. The Remote Location
“Long ago,” the general’s speech began, “in a galaxy far, far away” … It was a reference to Star Wars that may or may not have been freighted with implicit criticism of the $40 billion weapons program of the same name. He was introducing a plane that the Interceptors had seen and talked about for years, though the military had denied its existence. A black plane that had flown only at Dreamland was coming into the light.
Outside the Air Force Museum in Dayton, a color guard presented arms; dignitaries straightened their ties. On the back of the chair in front of me was stenciled a collection of numbers and letters and the words USAF CHAIR FOLDING.
Interceptors were there in number. A man with a name I knew only from the Internet, where he provided specifications of aircraft present and past, right down to the tail numbers, wore a Lockheed Skunk Works T-shirt—a bit tactless, I thought, considering this was a Northrop project. He took pictures of everything that moved, including one of the cargo planes that flew overhead, then looked around a little sheepishly.
Before coming to the Air Force Museum, this airplane had been legendary at Groom Lake, open only to the handful of officers with all the necessary clearances. Again the strange principle seemed to hold true: To get close to Dreamland, you had to go far away. In Ohio we were getting a glimpse into the heart of Nevada, at a plane that had somehow traveled from rumor and suspicion to commemoration with no visible stops in between. Perhaps this was why the ceremony in Dayton seemed an odd mix—half confession, half celebration.
When the curtain was drawn, it was clear this was the ugliest aircraft most of the audience had ever seen. It was long and stubby-winged, hard to put the shapes together in your head to make a whole you could imagine flying. It looked like someone’s effort to build a big fiberglass boat from magazine plans, abandoned halfway through. From the rear, it looked like some sort of modern architectural model, a building in Brasília, say, the exhaust vent a rising curve, like a concrete amphitheater.
It actually looked like Shamu, the star whale of Ocean World, and this became the nickname that stuck. The men who built it called themselves “whalers” and wore little lapel pins in the shape of a whale. That way, they could go out into the soft liberal world full of save-the-whale types and blend right in.
They had worked in a hangar beside the Stealth prototype Have Blue. For a long time, each of the two groups was forced to stay inside while the other was outside with its airplane: special access, need-to-know. It was the other team, getting a glimpse, that called it the Whale.
Whale was right: For the Interceptors, this was a kind of Moby-Dick, a great white whale of a genuinely mysterious flying object, long-sought, long-denied, legendary and mythical, now finally admitted. But material replaced mystery with a thud: The physical object was rough and ugly. It was also weird. The first thing I thought after seeing it was Who, describing such a thing floating over his head, would have been believed? Who then could not have had his certainty shaken that all flying objects were of terrestrial origin? With revelations surprising as this, how certain were we that there might not indeed be a Hangar 18, here at Wright-Pat or elsewhere, where alien bodies, creatures, parts, wreckage might be hidden?1
“There was a remarkable esprit” to the project, the speeches all agreed, born of the isolation of “the remote location,” the silence of the black world, the camaraderie of the initiate. “We even did our phenomenology work in remote locations,” said Stephen Smith, one of the top managers for Shamu. By phenomenology he meant radar testing. You could see the huge antenna from Freedom Ridge, and the big balloon balls used to calibrate it. These words suggested to me, however, the same old problem with Dreamland: that of knowing what was real and what was mere perception, speculation, rumor, fantasy. Of seeing and believing.
Patriotism, the dignitaries claimed, drove the project, even though it was not wartime. Steve Smith recalled “a strong sense of patriotic urgency with respect to Warsaw Pact nations at that time.” In other words, fear of a big offensive in Europe that would overwhelm Allied ground forces and cause the United States to go nuclear. Shamu was designed to hover above a battlefield, using radars to direct thousands of “precision-guided munitions” at the hordes of invading tanks.
“There’s a reception inside, under the B-36,” the museum director announced, and the Whalers headed inside to stand under the wing of the huge plane. According to a sign, this was the last B-36 ever to fly, when it was ferried on April 30, 1959, from the boneyard at Davis-Monthan to Dayton.
At the reception, Steve Smith explained that he was working in Iran in the seventies, helping the shah’s air force with its new F-20s, when the call came from his boss. He was being sent back for a special project, but was to be told nothing else until he was “brought in.”
He was briefed on the third floor of a dark parking garage at a hotel in the San Fernando Valley, he recalled, “like Deep Throat. It was real cloak-and-dagger stuff.”
The man in charge of the Tacit Blue program also stood beside the B-36. Jack Twigg was an Air Force colonel, detached to DARPA. Twigg was perfect for the part, always looking as if he were laughing at some private joke. He was never seen out of a sport coat, shirt, and tie, Smith recalled. “Everyone thought he worked for us, for Northrop.”
“I had the haircut,” Twigg interrupted with the air of a man who always likes to be in charge. “I had the crew cut, and that was the only thing that gave me away.”
Most of the wives and many children were at the ceremony. And that illuminated something it was easy to dismiss: that working in secrecy diminished the lives of the workers. It’s not just that they couldn’t answer the question, “Daddy, what did you do at work today?” but that their family lives could be jeopardized by the black hole of nondisclosure, which could quickly fill with suspicion. Security, one black worker said, was like wearing a lead raincoat.
The question could never be avoided: Was it really the job, or was it something else? A guy could be making it all up because he had a bimbo in Burbank, a floozy in Floral Park—hell, a whole second family someplace, or a bad gambling habit, or an unsavory job with organized crime. There were cases of con artists who pretended to be working in Dreamland, or some other secret facility, or for the Skunk Works.
Was there any sharper symbol of the isolation of the black world than the “hello” phone, the one-way dead-end telephone number given to families of those working at secret facilities like Dreamland?
In Blue Sky Dream, his memoir of growing up with a father who worked in SAR programs, David Beers gives a child’s viewpoint of all this. His father worked on Star Wars projects for Lockheed’s missile division, near the mysterious Blue Cube, the spy satellite control center in Sunnyvale, and during the eighties was dispatched to a place that may very well have been Dreamland.
He was gone for days and weeks to a place the mysterious people on the phone called The Ranch.
“Hal there?” an extremely serious male voice would ask whoever picked up the receiver at my parents’ house.
“No, can I tell him who called?”
“Tell him Gunner called. From The Ranch. He’ll know.”
What was this Ranch where Ronald Reagan had created new work for my father and for “Gunner” and for how many more? My mother and her children were curious, of course, but we had only the slimmest of details with which to construct a mental picture. We knew a man would find himself in some very high and precarious places at The Ra
nch, because one time my father returned wearing a strange pair of glasses, clunky plastic frames bought off a drugstore rack. He had lost his, he said, “while stepping onto a catwalk. I bumped my head and off came my glasses. I heard them hit the floor about, oh, eight to ten seconds later.” My father smiled as he said this, smiling as he tended to smile when he had just told you something that was very intriguing but just shy of violating his security oath.
We knew The Ranch was a place that could be very dark, because another time my father came back with a scabbed cut in his forehead. All he would tell us is that he had been driving across some dim landscape in the middle of the night in a rental car with the lights off and he had run into something and his head had been thrown forward into the steering wheel. “Why were you driving in the dark with no lights?” his wife and children wanted to know. But his answer was a smile.
To spy, you must agree to be spied on. To create a spy plane, you must agree to have your phone tapped, take lie-detector tests, have your background and clearance reviewed every five years.
That was the cost of working in Dreamland. Indeed, this seemed to be the key reason for the ceremony and the revelation of Shamu. At last the wives and the children, now grown, could be told. On black projects such as Shamu, Smith said, “All normal methods of communication are avoided, all identities and relationships are denied. Total isolation is the goal, and this caused hardship.” Divorce rates are high in black projects.
When the Air Force first began operating the Stealth fighter at Tonopah, it flew only at night. As a result, the pilots slept during the day. When they returned home on weekends, they would either continue to sleep all day, ignoring their families, or try, usually in vain, to switch their sleeping schedules, leaving them groggy and irritable. Some said they felt like vampires. Many pilots complained of a nagging exhaustion they could not shake. One of them was Ross Mulhare, who died in July 1986 when he flew his Stealth fighter into a hillside near Bakersfield. Mulhare’s family did not know what he was doing during the days he disappeared into the desert south of Tonopah, but they did know that he had to take a lie-detector test every three months.
Those who work on black projects must sign an agreement to respect the secrecy of information protected within Special Access Programs, called Sensitive Compartmented Information. These agreements, which for earlier programs were carried out under Reagan-era Executive Order 12356, involve an explanation of the system and “indoctrination.” Those inside understand they can be punished—fined and sent to prison for years—under sections 793, 794, 798, and 952 of Title 18 of the U.S. Criminal Code.
Secondhand accounts of the black world abound with tales of persuasive briefings punctuated by shouting and the near proximity of the muzzle of an M-16 rifle to the subject’s face. You will disappear, they are told. One former Red Hat flier simply took it for granted that people who talked about the program would disappear.
But the real teeth of the system, the tools for ensuring secrecy, are much more mundane: the threat of the end of a career, of loss of a pension, the regular administration of polygraph tests, the monitoring of phone calls and mail, the careful registration and tracing of the disposition of controlled documents and computer files. The Office of Special Investigations or FBI may also tap phones and watch the movements of employees and even family members.
With these tactics it is much easier to keep secrets than one would think. At first the black world was a world of intelligence—information. But beginning with the Manhattan Project, black methods were applied to the development of hardware—not just knowing things but building things. The Western Development Division of Air Research and Development in 1951, the first U.S. effort to develop an ICBM, was another early black program. Funding for these comes from budget lines with code names or vague headings. Some, like the U-2, were funded from various CIA funds. But the CIA is only one of some thirty-eight U.S. intelligence agencies, departments, and divisions, and its $2 billion budget is dwarfed by that of the National Security Agency.
Today, entire categories of operations are black as well: the SIOP (single-integrated operating plan) for fighting a nuclear war, “continuity of government” plans following a nuclear war, or antiterrorist operations, for instance.
The biggest misunderstanding about secrecy is that it is a matter of levels, that higher clearance gives one access to more stuff. In fact, the key is not vertical but horizontal—in compartmentalization. The engineers building a Stealth fighter are separated from those building a laser weapon; being cleared for one highly secret project does not mean access to another.
For this reason, the black system was developed with almost scholastic rigidity. Beyond such commonly known stamps as Top Secret or Classified are code warnings like WINTEL: Warning Notice—intelligence sources and methods involved; ORCON, originator controls access and distribution; NORFORM, meaning not to be seen by foreign nationals; NO CONTRACT, meaning not to be seen by contractors.
Categories of information had names different from those of the sources of that information, as part of the compartmentalization process. Such names are almost a parody of themselves. Readers of John le Carré will be familiar with the use of separate code names for a body of intelligence information and its source. The material called “Witchcraft,” for example, is produced from a source called “Merlin.”
In the fully developed Cold War system, categories of intelligence had names like Umbra and Spoke. Gamma was the name for intercepts of various Soviet communications. (It was also applied in 1969 to the program of spying on American leaders in their protests against the Vietnam War.) A whole host of “G” words—Gant, Gabe, Gyro, Gut, Gult, Goat—some real words, some made up, were used for specific categories of these intercepts: Gamma Guppy, for instance, was the name for overheard telephone conversations of Soviet leaders being driven around Moscow in their limos. It seemed to consist largely of gossip about their various mistresses.
Secret hardware programs received special names, like the Byeman names for spy satellites. The U-2 was Aquatone and Idealist. Discoverer covered Corona, the first spy satellite. But it was in the naming of research programs like Teal Rain and Have Blue by the services, and by such agencies as DARPA, that the new tone of the black world emerged. Something else works to protect secrecy: a sense of fraternity, the qualities of a secret society, a sense of belonging to something special. (“Special” is a key word in the Pentagon. “Special weapons” are nukes; “special operations” are commandos.) To define a group, a cult, a religion, not only are certain key words used but certain words are not used. In the black world, there are terms that are never spoken aloud, like the true name of God. You never say Groom Lake—you say “the Ranch,” or “the remote location.” And rarely do you even say black.
There were also active efforts to penetrate security—like LeMay’s old security testers in SAC—and others listening in on family phone calls and watching employees to see that the penetrators were not succeeding.
“There were many efforts to do this,” one of the Whalers told me, adding proudly, “To my knowledge, none of them were successful.”
“Were there also,” I asked, “active disinformation efforts or cover stories?”
“You’d have to ask the professionals about that,” he answered.
The professionals. AFOSI? FBI? When I did ask them, of course, I got the inevitable “We can’t talk about that.”
Besides the little whale lapel button, many of the whalers wore another pin: a diamond arrowhead, icon of the Pioneers of Stealth, the loose organization of black-world engineers who had worked on Stealth and now met for occasional reunions in a wave of nostalgia for those early days.
To the Interceptors, all this lent the hope that more craft that the Air Force and contractors had been hiding might soon emerge, other unidentified flying craft, like the Manta or Aurora. Like Q or the Tier III, which might or might not be the same thing. Q was said in the Lore to stand for “quantum leap in te
chnology.” It was also a traditional, even legendary designation for the top security clearance. Q, depending on which tales you believed, was either a successor to the failed Aurora or its code name. Or was Aurora a cover story for Q?
I hung around several of the pioneers, and eavesdropped as they spoke of their next reunion. Two of them were talking about the conclave. I gathered that an invitation would not be forthcoming. They discussed who might be attending. Several names were mentioned, then one asked, “And who should we invite from Q?”
Before the ceremony, I had walked around the base and the museum, trying to understand how Tacit Blue fit into the aviation history laid out there like a diagram. I was surprised by how open and green the place felt. I had not realized that the base was built around Huffman Prairie, the Wright Brothers’ flying field. Today Wright-Pat is huge, three airfields in all, and it is the center of the Air Force Systems command, the MIT and CalTech of aviation high-tech. It is also the home of the Foreign Technology section—perfect for investigating captured MiGs and, as the youfers believed, wreckage from Roswell or other saucer crashes.
Even if there is no Hangar 18, no “level 5” where the Roswell bodies are supposed to be on ice, plenty of buildings here looked right for the part: odd tanks and pipes, cubes and spheres, weird-shaped wind tunnels, all decorated with wisps of mysterious vapor.
20. The Anthill and Other Burlesques
The myth of Hangar 18 in Dayton would continue to grow. No report on it has failed to mention how Senator Barry Goldwater was not allowed access to the building, even with his top clearance. It was well known that he had tried to get Curtis LeMay to let him in. On the Internet, Robert Collins had recently posted an elaborate report on “underground vaults at WPAFB” based on inside sources and infrared photography.
