by Phil Patton
My most important debts are to Kathy, whose support went far beyond her excellent reading and editing, and to Caroline and Andrew.
There were a number of people, of course, whose requests not to be mentioned by name will be honored here, but who cannot escape being appreciated, and thousands of others from whom I learned much through postings and comments on-line.
Notes
CHAPTER 2: THE BLACK MAILBOX
1. Clouds in the desert take on a fascinating variety of shapes. But especially remarked on in Nevada are the lenticular or lens-shaped clouds—clouds that with the scalelessness lent by desert distance can seem very much like flying saucers. Many servicemen in the area, especially those from the East, are struck by them; they send photos back to their relatives and to small-town newspapers. The images are sometimes printed as saucer photos.
Fascination with lenticular clouds has taken other twists. Youfers looking at paintings and engravings have seen what most people would consider clouds as stylized flying saucers. I picked up a volume of UFO lore that contained a sketch of part of Piero della Francesca’s famous fresco series in Arezzo. The lenticular clouds pictured in the book seemed to look like flying saucers. But I looked up an image of the same part of the fresco in another volume and found the clouds quite cloudlike in the original.
CHAPTER 4: AURORA
1. Reports of near midair collisions with mysterious aircraft were often picked up by monitors of airlines’ radio traffic. The following is typical: “Last night [March 3, 1996] in the early evening, Flight 573 of America West Airlines was making a routine flight from Dallas to Phoenix when it came very close to colliding with a very, very large triangle-shaped craft over New Mexico at approximately thirty thousand feet. The craft, according to my source, was not seen by FAA flight controllers, but was picked up by NORAD, due to what was described as a doppler shift. The speed and direction of the unknown is not known at this time.”
Another overheard tower transmission at Las Vegas’s McCarran Airport:
McCarran Tower/Departure: “United 278 please confirm your heading.”
United Flight 278: “Well, I wanted to confirm that. Seems like your heading’s gonna take us pretty close to Dreamland.”
McCarran Tower/Departure (Aggressive, bordering on hostile): “United 278, I have no information on a location called Dreamland!!”
CHAPTER 7: VICTORY THROUGH AIRPOWER
1. Using the Defense Mapping Area charts, Paul McGinnis (Trader) assembled a list of other restricted military airspaces:
Area Number Description and Comments
R-2306A Yuma West, Arizona (Yuma Proving Ground)
R-2306B Yuma West, Arizona
R-2306E Yuma West, Arizona
R-2307 Yuma, Arizona (there is also a tethered balloon on 15,000-foot [4,615 meter] cables that carries a radar pointed south, used to detect drug smugglers. This is located near the northwest part of R-2307)
R-2308B Yuma East, Arizona
R-2501E Bullion Mountain East, California (Twenty-nine Palms Marine Corps Base)
R-2501N Bullion Mountain North, California
R-2501S Bullion Mountain South, California
R-2501W Bullion Mountain West, California
R-2502E Fort Irwin, California
R-2502N Fort Irwin, California (also includes NASA’s Goldstone facility)
R-2505 China Lake, California (western part of China Lake Naval Air Warfare Center)
R-2515 Muroc Lake, California (Edwards Air Force Base [AFB])
R-2516 Vandenberg AFB, California
R-2517 Vandenberg AFB, California
R-2519 Point Mugu, California (U.S. Navy-Pacific missile test range)
R-2524 Trona, California (eastern part of China Lake Naval Air Warfare Center. Includes the “highly classified” electronic warfare facility, the Randsburg Wash Test Range, also known as “Sea Site I”)
R-2914A Valparaiso, Florida (Eglin AFB, Air Force Development Test Center [AFDTC])
R-2915A Eglin AFB, Florida
R-2915B Eglin AFB, Florida
R-2918 Valparaiso, Florida
R-2919A Valparaiso, Florida
R-4806W Las Vegas, Nevada (Nellis AFB)
R-4807A Tonopah, Nevada
R-4807B Tonopah, Nevada
R-4808N Las Vegas, Nevada (R-4808N covers both the Nevada Test Site and the Dreamland “box” around Groom Lake, which is the rectangular region in the northeast of R-4808N)
R-4809 Tonopah, Nevada (R-4809 covers Tonopah Test Range, used for activities such as F-117 fighter testing and Department of Energy programs, such as nuclear rocket testing in the1960s)
R-5107A White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico
R-5107B White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, also includes Holloman AFB
R-6604 Chincoteague Inlet, Virginia (used by NASA’s Wallops Island rocket facility)
2. According to The Quiet Fire, a history of the band U2, the group took its name in the late seventies at the fairly casual suggestion of sometime band member Steve Rapid, who told bassist Adam Clayton about the spy plane and punned it with “you too.”
3. Published in 1965, Mission with LeMay is a central document in the history of Cold War culture.
One of its most fascinating passages is LeMay’s effusive comparison of SAC’s organization to a B-58 bomber “weapons pod.” He did not latch on to the obvious Freudian conclusions with which the thing fairly screamed; instead he compares it to a jack-in-the-box in describing an inspection:
The chief of the ground crew and one of his men are up on the dock, engaged in removing a metal plate from the fuselage of the aircraft. We stand and watch. Off comes the plate, and there is exposed a labyrinth of silver and wire and plastic … tiny colored blobs and shreds. That’s a meager crumb, a mere sample of the electronic equipment which is stuffed and geared throughout the stiff flesh of the B-58 … Something like the business of that old-fashioned jack-in-the-box you had as a child … You look up at that plate, and the fuselage aperture, and vaguely you wonder: how are they going to get that snake back in there?
They’ll get it back. And every tuft and every peg and every threadlike wire, and every infinitesimal jewel of the complex array will have been tested and found to be functioning, before that slice goes back on the aircraft—with reptiles arranged in designated position, before the plate is locked. The B-58 is crammed with those thousands and thousands of working warming cooling bits of metal and wire and tubing. Every available cubic inch within the body is occupied by such little monsters and treasures.
… And in that beautiful devilish pod underneath, the baby of the fuselage—half-size, but still of the same shape and sharpness, clinging as a fierce child against its mother’s belly—the B-58 carries all the conventional bomb explosive force of World War II and everything which came before. A single B-58 can do that. It lugs the flame and misery of attacks on London … rubble of Coventry and the rubble of Plymouth … Blow up or burn up fifty-three per cent of Hamburg’s buildings, and sixty per cent of the port installations, and kill fifty thousand people into the bargain. Mutilate and lay waste the Polish cities and the Dutch cities, the Warsaws and the Rotterdams. Shatter and fry Essen and Dortmund add Gelsenkirchen, and every other town in the Ruhr. Shatter the city of Berlin. Do what the Japanese did to us at Pearl, and what we did to the Japanese at Osaka and Yokohama and Nagoya. And explode Japanese industry with a flash of magnesium, and make the canals boil around bloated bodies of the people. Do Tokyo over again. The force of these, in a single pod.
One B-58 can load that comprehensive concentrated firepower, and convey it to any place on the globe, and let it sink down, and let it go off, and bruise the stars and planets and satellites listening in.
Every petard, every culverin, every old Long Tom or mortar of a naval ship in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, every turret full of smoky cannon at Jutland … Big Bertha bombarding Paris … musketry of the American Revolutionary battles or the Napoleonic ones. Spotsylvania an
d Shiloh and the battles for Atlanta. All the paper cartridges torn with the teeth, and all the crude metallic cartridges forced into new hot chambers.… Firepower. All the firepower ever heard or experienced upon this earth. All in one bomb, all in one B-58.
He went on: “The B-58 was and is symbolic of SAC … If you removed that plate from the body of SAC, you could look in and see people and instruments. They would be as the intricate electronic physiology of an airplane today: each functioning, each trained, each knowing his special part and job—knowing what he must do in his groove and place to keep the body alive, the blood circulating. Every man a coupling or a tube; every organization a rampart of transistors, battery of condensers. All rubbed up, no corrosion. Alert.”
The book also includes LeMay’s statement that while the Air Force had never intentionally concealed information on UFOs, there were many sightings for which it was never able to satisfactorily account.
CHAPTER 9: IKE’S TOOTHACHE
1. For other variations on the Men in Black theme, see Scott Spencer’s novel (Knopf, 1995) of the same name, about a literary novelist whose work-for-hire book on UFOs becomes a runaway bestseller, and Men in Black by John Harvey (University of Chicago Press, 1996), which delves into the long and complex semiology of black male attire, from Dracula to drag, Johnny Cash to Johnny Depp—without mentioning “the UFO silencers.”
CHAPTER 12: LOW OBSERVABLES
1. The Soviets were so skeptical of the idea of stealth that they ignored the implications of this study. In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes how an imprisoned scientist who suggested a stealthlike program was considered insane.
2. This quality of pornographic titillation extended to images of alien spacecraft and alien bodies as well. In the September 1996 issue of Penthouse, publisher Bob Guccione ran what can be described as a cheesecake shot of a dead alien—as a centerfold. It was most likely a photo of a prop from the Showtime network’s Roswell film.
CHAPTER 19: THE REMOTE LOCATION
1. Steve Douglass was astonished to see the pictures of Tacit Blue. He had seen this plane, he told me, before he’d begun investigating secret aircraft. He and his wife had been on vacation in New Mexico when they caught a glimpse of the thing sailing through a canyon, almost below them and the road on which they were driving. Indeed, it was that sighting that piqued Douglass’s interest and inspired him to look into the whole world of secret planes. But at the Air Force Museum ceremony, there was no reference to the testing of Shamu in New Mexico, which probably occurred at the White Sands radar cross-section testing facility.
CHAPTER 21: SPACE ALIENS FROM THE PENTAGON AND OTHER CONSPIRACIES
1. Black aircraft continued to become part of conspiracist mythology. During the 1992 presidential election, accusations were made stating that Vice President George Bush had secretly flown to Europe in the backseat of an SR-71 to meet with Iranian emissaries as part of the Iran-Contra deal. Only by means of an airplane as speedy as the Blackbird, it was believed, could this trip have been concealed.
2. The twisted connections between political conspiracy and saucer lore are further illustrated in Popular Alienation, an anthology of conspiracist literature from the Steamshovel Press. In the fevered essays gathered here, aliens mingle with spies and Men in Black, the Moonies, the Trilateralists, and the Bilderbergers, and all connect in seemingly simple, Lego-like attachments of coincidence and suspicion.
3. Trademarks on Area 51 became abundant. One buff tracked trademark filings and found twenty of them, in addition to the video game, trademarked by Atari, covering clothing, toys, and even a registration for the use of the name on “alcoholized lemonade and hard cider, beer, lager, ale, and malt liquor, and carbonated soft drinks, namely root beer.”
CHAPTER 22: SEARCHLIGHT
1. Skunk Works buff Andreas Gehrs-Pahl compiled this list of classified program names, the so-called Byeman Code Families, with his speculative interpretations:
• BIG (USAF Reconnaissance projects / missions?)
• BLACK (USAF Intelligence-gathering projects?)
• BLUE (USAF Special electronics missions?)
• BRILLIANT (SDIO/BMDO projects?)
• CHALK (US Navy programs?)
• CLASSIC (US Navy Surveillance / C3I programs?)
• COBRA (Telemetry Intelligence / Surveillance of missile tests?)
• COLD (USAF high-altitude missions?)
• COMBAT (USAF Evaluation of new hardware, test missions?)
• COMMANDO (USAF Special operations?)
• COMPASS (USAF drone/RPV and SIGINT/ECM programs?)
• CONSTANT (USAF development projects / deployments?)
• COPPER (USAF advanced technology studies?)
• CORONET (USAF Electronic surveillance, and deployments?)
• CREEK (USAF deployments?)
• EYE (Weapons developed by Naval Weapons Center, China Lake, CA)
• GIANT (USAF SAC missions and projects?)
• HAVE (DARPA/ARPA or Systems Command [Materiel Command] programs?)
• IRON (USAF anti-missile programs?)
• OLYMPIC (USAF reconnaissance / surveillance missions?)
• OUTLAW (US Navy Surveillance / C3I programs?)
• PACER (USAF modification and upgrade programs?)
• PAVE (“Precision Avionics Vectoring Equipment”)
• PEACE (US DoD Foreign Military Sales [FMS] / MAP programs?)
• PRAIRIE (US Navy Intelligence / SIGINT programs?)
• QUICK (US Army reconnaissance / SIGINT / ECM projects?)
• RETRACT (US Navy programs?)
• RIVET (USAF Electronic intelligence-gathering aircraft?)
• SENIOR (USAF reconnaissance or stealth-related aircraft / systems?)
• SILVER (USAF ELINT missions?)
• TEAL (Surveillance programs?)
• TRACTOR (US Army programs?)
• VOLANT (C-130 Hercules special missions?)
CHAPTER 23: “JOB KNOWLEDGE”
1. Inquiries brought this official response:
In response to your request for information concerning the Air Force’s facility at Groom Lake, Nevada, the 38,400-acre land area once known as “Area 51” was withdrawn from public use by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission more than 35 years ago under Public Land Order 1662 (filed June 25, 1958).
Since that time, the parcel has been used and administered as a national asset. Because DOE is not now active there, Area 51 no longer appears on maps of DOE’s NTS.
Today that land area is used by the Department of Defense as part of its 4,120-square-mile Nellis Air Force Range. For safety and national security reasons, air space above both the Nellis Range and the NTS is closed to commercial aviation and the general public.
CHAPTER 26: THE WHITE MAILBOX
1. Even author Dale Brown dismantled the Dreamland of his fiction: In Shadows of Steel, which was published in the summer of 1996, he describes a spy shooting down a super-secret plane at HAWC—his imagined “Hightech Aerospace Weapons Center” at Groom Lake. The incident leads to the closing of the facility and the dispersal of people and equipment.
Bibliography
Assembling these authors and titles, I was struck with a mischievous sense of how the accidents of alphabetization put sworn enemies side by side, pose the conspiracist beside the technologist—a further reminder of how weirdly disparate are the little Dreamlands so many observers have created. It’s as if all were lined up—on Freedom Ridge, say—for a group photo.
BOOKS
Steven Aftergood, John Pike, Dorothy Preslar, Tiffany Tyler. Mystery Aircraft. Federation of American Scientists, 1992.
George C. Andrews. Extra-Terrestrials Among Us. Fate/Llewellyn Publications, 1993.
James Bamford. The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency. Houghton Mifflin, 1982.
Timothy Green Beckley. The UFO Silencers: Mystery of the Men in Black. Inner Light Publications, 1990.
David Beers. Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America’s Fall from Grace. Doubleday, 1996.
Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore. The Roswell Incident. G. P. Putnam’s, 1980.
Michael R. Beschloss. Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair. Harper & Row, 1986.
Richard M. Bissell, Jr., with Jonathan E. Lewis and Frances T. Pudlo. Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs. Yale University Press, 1996.
Howard Blum. Out There: The Government’s Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials. Simon & Schuster, 1990.
Paul Boyer. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Pantheon, 1985. Second edition, University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
Arnold Brophy. The Air Force. Gilbert, 1956.
Courtney Brown. Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth. E. P. Dutton, 1996.
Dale Brown. Sky Masters. Donald I. Fine/G. P. Putnam’s, 1991.
Dino A. Brugioni. Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Random House, 1991.
C.D.B. Bryan. Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at M.I.T. Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Robert Buderi. The Invention That Changed the World. Simon & Schuster, 1996.
William Burrows. Deep Black. Random House, 1986.
Martin Caidin. Fork-Tailed Devil: The P-38. Ballantine, 1971.
Glenn Campbell. The Area 51 Viewer’s Guide. Self-published, 1993.
Glenn Campbell. A Short History of Rachel. Nevada, 1996.
