Dreamland

by Phil Patton

  The dedication of the ET Highway and the unveiling of the road signs that marked it was a ceremony twice hijacked. The first time was by the producers of the film Independence Day, which would dramatically change the Area 51 Lore. Whetting anticipation for the summer ’96 release of the movie, its stars agreed to join the ET Highway dedication, and the producers donated a “time capsule” to Rachel. This guaranteed that the politicians would be overshadowed.

  In front of the Little A“Le”Inn, actors Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum moved among a thin crowd and posed in front of the signs as Nevada tourism officials explained that prospective visitors could call an 800 number for an “ET Highway Experience” package complete with map. The governor joked that perhaps the signs should have been placed so they could be read from above.

  A well-known state legislator named Bob Price, an eccentric and colorful character who led “fact-finding trips” to the cathouses, appeared in Darth Vader costume. “You’re Bob Price,” shrewdly commented a Rachel youngster, looking right at him.

  “The only aliens I’ve seen are the people who visit here,” a little girl told Mary Manning, the reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and this youngster was more correct than she knew.

  The event was hijacked a second time on the highway itself. While PsychoSpy boycotted the dedication, the Minister and Agent X rode along in the convoy, which began in a parking lot in Las Vegas and headed up to Rachel for the unveiling of the official ET Highway signs along Highway 375. They portrayed the silhouettes of flying saucers and—no ET here—an F-117 in silhouette.

  Agent X led the way in a rented red LeBaron; the Minister’s CRX was in fifth place. There were about thirty cars and a big charter bus. As they came down from Hancock Summit into the Tikaboo Valley about thirty miles south of Rachel, just at the point where the Groom Road stretched out to the west, looking as always like a pole of dust rising straight into the air, the Minister caught sight of a bright yellow sign stuck into the dirt by the roadside, with an arrow to the left and the official ET Highway logo. Soon the whole convoy was rumbling in a cloud of dust down the dirt road, straight toward the Area 51 perimeter.

  It was a plot by the Interceptors, code-named Operation Coyote, after the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote, who is constantly posting fake road signs to divert the Roadrunner.

  The Minister decided to pull off before he got to the guard shack he knew lay a few miles ahead. He understood the rule: You’re under arrest once you get to the shack, which is on the wrong side of the perimeter.

  Then a Nevada highway patrolman realized what was happening and came roaring up, siren wailing, lights blazing. Through the dust ahead, the Minister could see the lead car taking a sharp right-hand turn onto a dusty road that doubled back toward route 375, through the Medlin ranch. But the planners of the diversion had clearly hoped that it might go all the way—the governor of Nevada and other dignitaries, the whole motley movie and business crowd arriving at the perimeter. Hell, at the guardhouse!

  Independence Day, which set box-office records by grossing nearly $150 million in its first two weeks of release in July 1996, established Dreamland in the popular mind—but with a twist. The film provided a key new link in the Lore. It tied Area 51 directly to Roswell, whose legend was also growing daily. While, of course, the traditional story had tied Roswell to Hangar 18 at Wright-Pat, the legendary repository of recovered saucers and bodies, Independence Day’s story had them ending up at Area 51. At one point, the president says disdainfully, “I can assure you there is no Area 51.” “Well, Mr. President,” the head of the CIA responds, “that’s not … exactly … true.”

  Area 51 becomes the headquarters in the movie from which Earth resists invasion. The president asks the questions we were all asking about Area 51. “How come I wasn’t told about this place?” “How did they keep this secret?” “How did they pay for it all?” But since Area 51 ends up saving humanity, the implication is that we should be grateful it was there. Thus millions of people heard about Area 51 for the first time.

  Hollywood’s Area 51 looks more like we’d imagined it than the real one: It is slicker, shinier, more sci-fi. The film conjures up an underground lab with tilted glass walls and aliens stored in giant lava-lamp-like containers. It’s packed with high-tech equipment: all the war rooms and secret labs of a dozen films of the past rolled into one. It looks, in fact, something like the Area 51 in the video game.

  In the early nineties, Ed McCracken, the CEO of Silicon Graphics, whose workstations are used both to devise new aircraft designs and to produce movie special effects, declared that the demands of mass media had supplanted those of the Pentagon as the engine of technological innovation. A 1996 Air Force report on the future, called “New World Vistas,” declared that “entertainment organizations” had the skills and means to produce better simulators than the military.

  Was Hollywood supplanting the Pentagon? Would the Dreamworks movie studio be the future source of Dreamland’s technology?

  “Calling all ‘Encountered People’!” read the proclamation that appeared on the Internet in August 1996. An outfit calling itself Zzyzx Productions and “The Center for the Study of Aerial Phenomenon” announced “Abduction, live at Area 51. An all-night political action rally and UFO-watching vigil” and “rave party.” The fine print coyly declared an intention to “encourage peace, love, and harmony, so leave your ray guns at home.” The tickets, twenty-five dollars a pop, would be available through TicketMaster.

  That seemed reasonable for a pass to Area 51, only the party turned out to be scheduled for a lot behind the trailers in Rachel. The music would be techno—the robotic dance stuff of the new Germany, steeped in the dust of the Wall, now imported, manipulated, and cut to street strength. The idea seemed to be that the fellows at the base might warm to this New Age Woodstock. What I was hoping for was something more like the Saucerian conventions at Giant Rock.

  The road was familiar to me now, but it seemed somehow different—richer—with each trip. The landscape’s browns and tans seemed to contain rather than exclude colors, if not outright reds and greens, at least what the red and green brown might dream of being. In the little settlements along the way, a few optimists attempted to fight the browns of the desert by painting their houses and stores in bright aqua or turquoise. It took me a while to see how shrewd a choice that color was, how that turquoise sang out against the landscape. It was the direct opposite and a powerful antidote to the oppressive hue of the desert.

  On the way up to Rachel I stopped for gas. As I paid and came back to the car, I noticed a world-weary guy with a sleeveless shirt and a beat-up pickup. “How are you?” I asked.

  “A little closer to somewhere,” he answered, as if trying to convince himself.

  And I almost said, “But still a hell of a long way from anywhere.”

  When I finally reached the Black Mailbox, I spotted a Camry with Arizona plates parked beside it. I pulled over to talk to a young couple who stood looking off toward the Ridge. The man was a stockbroker. “They say this is the place,” he commented, dreamily. “We drove all the way from Tucson, just to see.”

  The most romantic thing about the rave was the dust swirling in the big floodlights. The promoters had promised “sunbaked desert dance dirt,” “fire-breathing tribal drum circle,” and all-night dancing in the shadows of the Jumbled Hills. They held open the possibility that the boys at the base might be tickled enough to float one up just over the Ridge, offer a hint of the mysteries beyond. The partygoers I talked to knew of Area 51 only as a saucer site. They were ignorant of the history of the U-2 and the Blackbirds.

  In Rachel, the locals—piqued by the prospect of drugged and drunken youth from as far away as Los Angeles—watched with interest. The sheriff’s office required the promoters to post a large bond, and deputies’ cars patrolled the area. Strange vehicles—Woodstock-era Microbuses, junker compacts with out-of-state plates—began to appear in front of the Quik Pik and the Inn.


  At the Research Center, some of the Interceptors gathered to watch. In the little yard by the trailer, they dipped chips and roasted hot dogs and marveled at the speed with which the media machine had latched on to the mythology of Area 51.

  “It’s become the dominant urban folk legend of the nineties,” Zero said in the kitchen, unwrapping more chips. Behind the trailer was a little shed with a platform on its roof that turned out to be handy for viewing the preparations. We climbed up to look at the assembling trucks and lights and speakers. It was Little Freedom Ridge, a mini-Tikaboo, but it would bear the weight of only three or four people.

  I had checked into a motel up the road in Alamo. The lady at the desk told me they had a special deal: two bucks extra for five channels of TV, five dollars for the cable and ten channels more. I went the whole hog: a better rate per channel. Besides, I felt a need to stay close to the umbilical cord of mainstream culture.

  I lay down for a few minutes in the afternoon and in a groggy sleep dreamed that I had figured out the secret of the numbering system for the areas at the test site, which appeared randomly on the map. It all had to do, I dreamed, with an angle of the border of each area from the north-south axis. When I awoke and looked again at the map, I realized the dream scheme made no sense at all, that it was these sorts of angular alignments that the supporters of the Mars face, the believers in ancient civilizations and secret bases on Mars and the moon, used to support their case.

  The individual’s dreamwork is echoed in that of his culture. The same strategies of compression, substitution, abbreviation, displacement, and symbolism Freud sees in individual dreams may apply, I realized, to the shapes of tales in the Lore.

  If you believed that dreams were worth looking at as a way to understand a person’s hopes and fears, then wouldn’t looking at the dreams of a culture accomplish the same thing? Couldn’t the fascinations of its core be written in the obsessions of the fringe? A tunnel at the nuclear test site evolved into a network of underground railroads, perhaps, a MiG was transmuted into an alien ship, a flare into a saucer’s light. I thought of the tales of the footprints of deer melting out in the sun into those of the imagined Yeti.

  Any dream expresses a wish, Freud states, but how could some of the dark and frightening dreams I had heard be wishes? They saw the source of the fear discharged, was Freud’s answer. They granted a wish, too, for order and explanation—dreams crystallized vague fear into a specific bogeyman, which one could better comprehend. Couldn’t the fear of a new world order be an expression of a desire for order; couldn’t the arrival of aliens save us by organizing us to resist?

  The souvenir vendors had arrived first thing in the morning. The latest item was a T-shirt showing a saucer over the lake bed and the legend “Area 51 Yacht Club.” One vendor, an enormous man selling glow-in-the-dark alien heads, T-shirts, and charms, told me he used to be with Navy Intelligence. He sat in a minivan beside the Rachel Quik Pik, wearing a SEAL team T-shirt and an LAPD bomb squad cap.

  “Naval Intelligence,” he repeated. “Ever hear of Richard Marcinko? Seal Team Seven. It’s not supposed to exist, but it does.”

  He had strong opinions on Bob Lazar’s story. “That W-2 is as real as can be,” he said.

  That night, huge screens surrounded the circular dance floor, flashing music-video images back on themselves, reminding some of old drivein movie screens. But only a few dozen dancers showed up, groggy after the long drive dodging the cows that sat on the edges of the ET Highway. The bitter alkaline dust stung the eyes and seeped into every fissure of clothing and body.

  A few misguided Hollywood types ended up in town. At one point a limousine turned in to the parking lot and I caught a glimpse of a softly lit interior, packed with cut-crystal decanters glowing like artifacts in an old-fashioned sci-fi film. Then the dust rose up and covered it all.

  The UFO souvenirs failed to sell well. At the end of the evening, I caught sight of the Naval Intelligence man still sitting in the minivan. There was no evidence he had ever left it.

  25. Remote Viewing; or, “Anomalous Cognition”

  At the rave, the promoters had lined up a series of real-life “abductees,” who sat at card tables arrayed under tents looking ill at ease. Among them was a woman who did not claim to be an abductee but was willing to talk—a lot, very fast, and in run-on sentences—about black helicopters, Tesla, thought bubbles, interdimensionals, and portals. Her name was Kathleen Ford, and around the time I first climbed the Ridge and looked down on the base, she’d begun taking pictures of strange floating or flying objects along Mailbox Road, looking west over the Jumbled Hills toward Dreamland.

  “At first I wanted to take pictures of UFOs and sell them to magazines and make money,” she told me. A blackjack dealer in Las Vegas, she would come up every few weeks and shoot day and night.

  Ford was clearly smarting from a long history of encountering skepticism—how often had she heard that this image, say, couldn’t be a flare, or that one was surely not the effects of lens or diaphragm. She pointed out one photo that was shot on Easter Sunday, a holiday that even the denizens of Dreamland respected, she said, and on which they did not fly.

  I had seen some of these snapshots on the wall at the Little A“Le”Inn, along with all the other greasy, dusty, spotted images of lights in the sky. They were all carefully labeled with details about the camera and film used. In almost every instance, the name of the camera was misspelled. The captions included as much specificity about the time, date, and equipment as there was a lack of specificity about their content. “Two visible ships taken by Mail Box Road Cannon with 200 Zoom Kodak Gold 200.” Or, “Invisible ship with light beam going below mountain. This photo was shot facing west at Mail Box Road at 7:50 A.M. Fugi Automatic with 80 zoom, Kodak T-Max, 400 B/W.”

  One word of that caption caught my attention: invisible. As in: “This invisible object appeared after I experimented with music.”

  By invisible, I understood her to mean that things showed up in the photographs without having been visible when the shutter was snapped.

  “That’s when I got the eyeball,” she said.

  “The what?” I asked.

  “The eyeball. I give them all names and this one I just call the eyeball. It’s translucent.”

  Indeed it could be an eyeball, floating in front of the flash-lit, out-of-focus grass by the highway, the soft LED digits of the dating function visible in the lower right-hand corner. Emerson’s transcendental eyeball, Jung’s eye in the sky—whatever you wanted to call it.

  “After I got this one I went, ‘Oh … my … God.’ I cried for three weeks. They’ve lied to us, I thought. When I saw this, everything I had read about UFOs and had dismissed suddenly became feasible and I cried, cried, cried, cried.”

  I picked up the book Ford said had inspired her. The paperback cover of Silent Invasion, by Ellen Crystall, Ph.D., bore an image of an alien face, like a film still. Inside were lots of photographs that resembled Ford’s, pictures of “Tesla globes,” spaceships, even aliens in Westchester County, New York.

  Crystall was the clear source of inspiration at least for Ford’s captions: The author, with her apt New Age name, had supplied the same details of camera and film type for her photos. Here was a typical Crystall caption: “Large Tesla Field. Taken: June 12, 1988, at Pine Bush, New York. Camera: Nikon 35mm SLR with 50mm lens. Film: Kodacolor negative print film (ASA 400). Exposure: 1/60 sec. at f//1.4 with flash.” Elsewhere, she supplied the name of her developer: Fotomat.

  Crystall’s globes and ships could also have been drops of some kind of staining liquid on the film or lens, but she saw them as Tesla bubbles and beams and ships and aliens. She might not have seen it unless she believed it. There was a twist: While Ford had photographed UFOs she couldn’t see with her eye, Crystall claimed to have seen UFOs that didn’t appear in her pictures. Some UFOs, she believed, generated shortwave or other radiation that made them invisible. She had seen triangles in Westche
ster County that resembled the black planes seen in Nevada and California. But realizing that such planes were not generally tested in populated areas, she concluded that “there may be forms of stealth aircraft that are ‘true’ UFOs built and operated by human beings.”

  She argues that the B-2 Stealth bomber shown to the public “is really a decoy to divert attention from where the money and effort are really being placed—namely, on construction of enhanced stealth craft capable of hovering at ground level, cruising at speeds ranging from slow walk to thousands of miles per hour, and turning invisible to the human eye. In other words—American UFOs.”

  Crystall’s and Ford’s photographs reminded me of the strange and sinister forms, like malign bacteria, seen through a microscope; or of the atomic blasts in Harold Edgerton’s photographs—no vision of an alien invasion could ever conjure up a more sinister-looking life-form than these death-forms, slices of vision thinner than the human eye could seize. Ford’s photos were just as disturbing.

  Invisible craft made visible—that was Ford’s goal. I was reminded of a chapter in the Air Force “New Vistas” report boldy headed “Invisible Airplanes.” The report talks about all the planes of tomorrow, unmanned, invisible to radar, to infrared, to the human eye. The fighting robot planes—UCAVs—that would succeed UAVs would have even stranger shapes. They might look like tailless triangles, like pumpkin seeds, even like discs. “Potentially,” said Air Force planners in Aviation Week, “a saucer shape could produce the most maneuverable UCAV if combined with vectored thrust for maximum lateral agility. Moreover, a weapon could be pointed by simply rotating the aircraft without altering course.”