Dreamland

by Phil Patton

  Lyne turns the Cosmic Watergate on its head. Far from being a cover-up, he asserts, the saucer stories were all a put-on—a Hollywood production to frighten us into the arms of the NWO, to create Reagan’s unifying alien threat. The saucers came not from other galaxies but from Earth. The Nazis had taken the technology of Tesla and developed flying saucers, which they used to fly to exile in South America—perhaps even Antarctica. Werner von Braun flew the flying saucers out of White Sands after the war. Hitler escaped from his bunker to South America and visited San Antonio, Texas, in 1967 as a guest of LBJ. But when Lyne—and he alone apparently—recognized Hitler and Eva Braun, they were quickly hustled away.

  Lyne was always a key player in the dramas he described. He told how he had quarreled with Sargent Shriver over his dismissal from the Peace Corps and how in 1975 George Bush had offered him a high position with the CIA, which he rejected.

  Lyne’s biography states that he saw his first UFO as a child in Kermit, Texas. He received an MFA in “studio arts” from Sam Houston State University; he certainly had artistic talent. His book is illustrated with obsessive and skillful drawings, part engineering diagram, part R. Crumb.

  He believed the National Security Act of 1947, dividing the armed services, was treasonous, and that the Roswell incident was a hoax. The “aliens” were dead monkeys from the rocket tests at White Sands, crudely disguised. He had seen photos of them, but they were stolen by a former girlfriend. He produced drawings from memory, in his skillful but jittery style.

  He rolled all the myths together, all the government cover-ups into one all-consuming conspiracy. Hitler escapes, and strange artifacts float around in the hands of old Indians in the Southwest. No topic was too large to bring into his web—Lyne delivers a long excoriation of “Platonist epistemology”—and none was too small—the powers in Detroit conspiring to squash the small, inexpensive Crosley automobile of the late forties.2

  While the account in Space Aliens from the Pentagon possesses a singular viewpoint—all the information had somehow come to Lyne and Lyne alone—another perspective on Dreamland employs a dizzying collage of clippings and reports.

  In two videotapes entitled Secrets of Dreamland, a man named Norio Hayakawa, who had led the Japanese TV crew to Bob Lazar, had produced a carefully, not to say obsessively, documented depiction of a vast conspiracy swirling about Dreamland like a dust devil.

  The tapes are made up mostly of footage of a lecture Hayakawa had given to a religious group called the Prophecy Network. He makes token gestures to an apocalyptic sort of Christianity—probably for the benefit of the audience, whose favorite book of the Bible is the infinitely interpretable Revelation. The lecture is generously illustrated with clips about exotic military programs for mind control, electromagnetic warfare, lasers, and exotic aircraft from such sources as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Aviation Week. The lecture is followed by home-video footage of flying saucers along Mailbox Road: lights jumping in the sky and turning on the proverbial dime.

  UFOs, Hayakawa concludes, are part of a created threat designed to stampede the populace into accepting the New World Order. He reports, “Dreamland is said”—that passive tense again—“to be an acronym for Data Repository Establishment and Management Land. It will be the center for a future satellite linkage system that will centralize all global computer data network systems.

  “A device known as Battle Engagement Area Simulator and Tracker (B.E.A.S.T.), developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and [to] be launched into orbit under the auspices of DARPA, will link all global data network systems in the air.

  “The Beast”—yes, the noted Beast of Revelation—“will be some type of a super-computer linking station launched into orbit in a few more years. It may link stations emitting hologramic images into the atmosphere to control the ‘thinking’ patterns of the populace.”

  In the hours I had spent watching Hayakawa’s Secrets of Dreamland videotapes I had noted his shift toward the conspiratorial. There were two tapes, released a couple of years apart, and between them was a subtle change in emphasis, extended even to the packaging, and an apparent shift in his target audience from the youfers to a New World Order conspiracy audience. It was not only good marketing, reflecting a changing world, but indicated a change in Norio’s thinking. He believed that the Rockefeller Foundation in North America and the Rothschild financial conglomerate in Europe are an integral part of the entity known as the Bilderbergers, which plans to establish the New World Order by the year 2002.

  “The Lord,” Hayakawa announces, “is literally coming to catch his believers in the air. A mass confusion will take over the world.” I wondered at that moment whether he had ever heard the Louvin Brothers’ song “The Great Atomic Power,” in which the victims of the A-bomb rise to meet their savior in the air.

  His argument draws equally from scripture and Aviation Week and goes like this:

  The New World Order, a secret government, is using UFOs to frighten us into accepting their tyranny. Strange new technologies are controlling us, including holographic projection and other forms of mind control.

  “It is my opinion,” Hayakawa insists, “that an elite group of globalists has always believed that the ultimate way to create some type of global unity was to create an artificial threat from elsewhere. It could be war, disasters, worldwide calamity, et cetera, to create an artificial ‘crisis.’ But the ultimate one is to create an external threat from ‘outside,’ and the most convincing one will be an ‘alien’ threat from beyond earth.

  “To this end,” he intones, “I believe that we have slowly been brainwashed and manipulated to believe in the existence of ‘extraterrestrial’ entities. Look at the proliferation of ‘alien’-related films and TV documentaries and semidocumentaries. I think that this is all a part of the conditioning process that is preparing us psychologically to accept the ‘alien’ presence and sensitize us to the ‘alien threat’ in the very near future.”

  He talks of devices to control minds, some of which may cause temporary memory loss. Certain chemicals are used, and equipment. There is reference to a Dr. Igor Smirnoff—very much his real name—who developed an acoustic device for mind control. Work is going on at Wright Patterson Air Force Base to create brain-actuated airplane controls.

  Hayakawa delves into some Joseph Campbell–like interpretations as well. The legendary Majic or MJ-12 from UFO lore is traced to symbolic code words, an occult term from ancient days, linked to magi, or wise men.

  The secret government is sensitizing us, he says, preparing us for the takeover. The clips from the popular press prove this. “When The Washington Post says so, it is already done.”

  Hayakawa narrates the video clips of his saucer-chasing expeditions that follow his lecture, like an appendix in a book, in a very different voice. “The intensity of sound stunned us,” he says breathlessly in one. “You could physically feel the noise from eighteen miles away.” There are shots from Freedom Ridge, a bouncy, smeary view of the base at night, and a red glow. Is it a plane? “It might just be a car,” says a voice on the sound track. “No,” another voice, overflowing with excitement, counters. “That’s a ship. See, there are trucks around it?… They’re getting ready to send it up.”

  Because of these videotapes, I ended up one August day in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo. I stepped from the heat into the cool dark lobby of a Japanese American funeral home. It stood near a toy warehouse in an area not so much ethnically colorful as ethnically triumphant: architecture as slick and corporate as Tokyo’s, a Buddhist temple in its own little park, a series of looming brutalist apartment buildings with mall. At one edge of Little Tokyo stood a replica of a building from the internment camps, a tattered barrackslike building that might have been pulled from the wreckage of an abandoned training base—the old Tonopah, say, or Indian Springs.

  I waited in front of a sign that read SLUMBER ROOM VIEWING. A sweet odor filled the air, and somber Japanese Muzak drifte
d by. Then a friendly man emerged: Norio Hayakawa, UFO buff, Area 51 researcher, and full-time funeral director.

  I had e-mailed Hayakawa, asking to talk to him, and he agreed. He delicately warned me not to mention UFOs if I called him at the funeral home. “You know how it goes,” he said, in the tired phrase of many saucer buffs trying to get by in the more mundane world.

  I wanted to hear how Hayakawa would tie Dreamland into the Book of Revelation, a dangerously heady elixir for preachers and prophets of many shades.

  It turned out to be a little more complicated: Hayakawa went easy on the specific biblical references, hailing a more general “spirituality” that, along with the unification of the various militias, he sees as our best hope of salvation.

  After the teeming conspiracy tales of the tape, I hardly knew what to expect of Hayakawa in person. He was gracious, friendly, disarming. We drove to a restaurant on the edge of Little Tokyo. He was honored by my visit and interest, he told me, but he seemed weary, tired of it all.

  “My main thesis,” he pronounced, almost as if by rote, “is that highly developed technology could be utilized to stage a fake alien invasion to desensitize us to intrusive authority and shocking revelations.

  “I think it’s always going to be a mystery. It will never be solved. Or by the time we find out what is there, it will be too late. We won’t find out until all hell breaks loose.”

  In his lecture, Hayakawa points out that the year 1947 was when all these strange things began to happen: the founding of the Air Force and the CIA, the Roswell crash. He does not mention the death of Bugsy Siegel and the bankruptcy of the Flamingo, the transistor or the Truman Doctrine or Yeager’s first flight through the sound barrier. When I asked, he explained that he traced his own fascination with what he called “the UFO phenomenon” back to that year, perhaps because in 1947 his father, a fisherman, looked up from his boat off the coast of Japan and saw a strange light in the sky.

  Hayakawa graduated from high school in Yokohama, and joined Japanese UFO groups in 1963. He attended college in New Mexico and made contact with other UFO watchers in the state. By 1976 he was teaching at a school in suburban Phoenix. In 1988 he watched with fascination when the Fox network, already working its reputation as the tabloid of TV, broadcast the show UFO Cover-up? Live! It was the first time Hayakawa heard the term “Area 51.”

  Nearly a year later, he heard Bob Lazar speak on the Billy Goodman radio show. Hayakawa had long served as a kind of UFO scout or consultant for Nippon TV in Japan, and he let them know about Lazar. In February, NTV sent a correspondent and crew to Las Vegas with Hayakawa.

  “Lazar showed us the documents concerning his work,” he explained. “Later we found out that his Social Security number”—on the famed W-2 that showed Lazar being paid $977.11 by Naval Intelligence—“belongs to a person in New York.”

  On Lazar’s advice, Hayakawa and the crew headed up to Mailbox Road to look for saucers. “We were looking toward S-4, over the Jumbled Hills, when this strange light came up, went up and down. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve experienced.”

  Hayakawa’s video shows jumpy images of lights. You can hear the hissing, flickering sound the desert wind makes in the microphones, threatening to obscure the signal.

  Hayakawa made many trips back to Mailbox Road, sometimes with Gary Schultz. He had seen the saucers, he thought, and on his tapes there are many lights moving erratically in the sky. He also believed he had seen UAVs flying up there. But he had also come to wonder if some of the things flying had not been illusory images, projected somehow, perhaps holographically—high-tech illusions.

  Today, Hayakawa says, “mystification” has taken over Area 51. He sees patterns and connections everywhere; he links the Beast computer to the Book of Revelation. He is fascinated by numbers. Did I realize, he asked, that 1998 was a critical year, 666 times three? Something big would happen. Is it all part of the symbolism for a diabolical trinity? he wonders.

  He believes that Lazar’s claims are so far beyond any verification that he feels he has been a tool of disinformation—and quite likely mind control. “I believe he was used unwittingly to spread disinformation.”

  “High strangeness,” he said, as if in conclusion, “high strangeness.” He sounded as if he felt betrayed. I sensed he was a bit weary of the contention, even weary of his own theories. He was, I felt, the outsider par excellence, as alienated as only a Japanese American running a funeral home could be.

  At the end of our conversation, country-and-western music somehow came up. Hayakawa finally came alive. He brightened all over. It was amazing to see him finally smile. He was wild about country-and-western music, he said. He had a portable keyboard system, which he had brought with him and played at the Little A“Le”Inn. I suspected that he wanted above all to be a real American.

  I felt a wave of affection for Norio Hayakawa, sympathy for his fragmented roles, for his disappointment in Lazar. He had in a sense been left at the altar by the UFO world, embarrassed by Gary Schultz, stood up at the airport by Bob Lazar.

  On the label of his video Secrets of Dreamland 2, Hayakawa is referred to as a “phenomecologist [sic] and researcher.” A typo (so frequent in UFO material) or an effort at new coinage? Perhaps an attempt to combine phenomenologist and ecologist—“the ecology of phenomenon.” The very phrase teemed with possibilities. I thought of a course of university study I had recently heard of called “media ecology.” In a sense, Hayakawa’s work was a mad gloss on the media. All his clippings about secret mind control programs, implanted chips, holographic projections, and the like were perfectly documentable in journals describing the frontiers of research. But that word “phenomecologist” also suggested “pharmacologist.” Was conspiracy thinking a drug prescribed for existential ills, an antidote for alienation, the way Hayakawa’s music was?

  Later, he sent me his demonstration tape. Its cover showed him in front of a pickup truck in the middle of the desert—a classic C&W shot. In the desert, I thought, everyone is a country star, everyone is an American—and everyone is an alien.

  His songs were classics—“Branded Man,” “Why Me, Lord?,” “I’ll Fly Away.” I would never have expected to hear anything, however, like Norio Hayakawa singing “Sensuous Woman.” I had forgotten to ask him if he had ever heard “The Great Atomic Power,” but I somehow felt he lived in the apocalyptic spirit of that song.

  Hayakawa’s tape became a key part of my personal sound track for the desert. With ZZ Top’s version of “Viva Las Vegas,” it was instrumental in keeping me awake on the long drives around the perimeter of Dreamland.

  After I talked to Hayakawa, I headed up the road from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The link between the two cities, it always struck me, was like that between the cartoon sleeper and the dream bubble above his head. Vegas was L.A. distillate, a step further into fantasy than even Hollywood would go. I was following in the footsteps of men who had bigger ideas than L.A. could grasp, men like Bugsy Siegel, the inventor of Las Vegas.

  The way rocking in a boat all day means that when you close your eyes at night on land you will feel waves, immersion in Norio Hayakawa’s thinking left me seeing links everywhere. I donned his worldview like a pair of polarizing sunglasses. I listened to the radio news with suspicion. I noticed a weird symmetry in the way the sun was going down and the moon rising—the two circles the same height, the same size. Why?

  It struck me, trying to go with his flow, that Hayakawa was a Jungian—he saw just as many archetypal meanings in the world. His was a world teeming with meanings—too full of meanings, perhaps. Conspiratorial, “mystified” meanings. “Mystified” was what he had said about Dreamland—“they’ve mystified it”—and now they were using our fascination with it to delude us.

  A little later in the day, when a song by Willie Nelson came on, a verse stuck in my mind, a warning that sometimes your dreams can begin dreaming you.

  Norio Hayakawa, an admitted “conspiratorologist,” see
med resigned to living in the world such a role created. This meant that he encountered Dreamland everywhere he looked. In return for understanding the secret order, he had to accept the impossibility of escaping that order—it grew to take dominion everywhere. “The place has no edges.” Hadn’t the Minister warned us?

  Pulling in for gas at a truck stop in Barstow, I came across the Area 51 video game. It was a big hit in the arcades, I learned, and I kept running across it in diner lobbies, in mall arcades, outside movie theaters.3

  The game’s opening screen summed up perfectly the new pop mystique the phrase “Area 51” had taken on: “Area” in military crate stencils, “51” in big bank-vault metallic letters and numbers, dented with bullets. This was the vague popular understanding of the mythical, imagined “Area 51”—the aliens have literally possessed military bodies. “The fate of humanity hangs in the balance,” the instructions explain, at the same time promising a “detailed re-creation of the most secretive airbase in the world.” If you read the fine print, you learn that “Area 51” had been trademarked.

  The premise of the game is that a saucer, or other craft, has been recovered and its occupants have taken over the base. The player must get inside as part of a special SWAT team and battle “alien-infected personnel,” a handy means of conflating evil, nonhuman expendable aliens with traditional images of bad guys wearing berets and overalls—the type that die by the dozens in Hollywood action films. Boxes and barrels surround the place; there are hot fighters and tough humvees scattered about. A panel truck bears the designing firm’s name, Mesa Logic.