ufo

DISPATCH FROM DREAMLAND

by Jill Neimark

Out in the middle of the Nevada desert, America's secrets--from UFOs to military war games and cover-ups--and our perennial longing for mystery and redemption all come together.

They call it the loneliest road in America, and I'd been driving it most of the morning, down through the undulating desert blue of Nevada's Great Basin. Dust, cactus flowers, and the stillness of the mountains put me in a contemplative mood. They are brutal, those rocks, but you can see ancient oceans moving in them, carved in waves of stone.
    I'm on my way to the town of Rachel, a forlorn hive of dusty trailers parked at the side of the Extraterrestrial Highway--which may be the second loneliest road in America--to investigate our country's obsession du jour, UFOs.
    Rachel borders the government's infamous military base, Area 51--also known as Groom Lake or Dreamland--a sprawling compound of lakes and buildings that don't officially exist. It's the site of the blackest of `deep black' weapons secrets, a place rumored to house aliens in underground tunnels (where a nutritive pâté made of humans is supposedly spread on their skin in exchange for advice on intergalactic travel), to be a dumping ground for nuclear waste and a facility for plutonium research, as well as the home of stealth aircraft that may fly above Mach 5--five times the speed of sound. The sonic boom from these planes has been known to lift cars off the ground and shatter glass. No wonder flying saucers have been sighted so frequently in these skies, and Rachel has become a kind of desert Lourdes for ET seekers from around the world.
    It is dreamland out here, in the immeasurable desert--and it's an uncanny crossroads of our culture, from aliens to government conspiracies, the noisy money of Vegas (half Hades, half Disney), itinerants living in trailers yet wired to the Web, real estate moguls who buy university chairs and then get in bed with scientists and weapons researchers and the CIA, supposedly in order to study life after death and--aliens? And all along the way you find the fossils of our past--mining ghost towns, salt flats, and Indian artifacts--somehow mixed in with the promise of our future, the unearthly beauty of those stealth bombers and the technology that made them.
    And below and above it, emptiness. I've come to the dead center of nowhere, to see why we've filled it with aliens.

Alien America, Circa 1997
    You probably don't need reminding, but the last few years could have been nicknamed Invasion of the ETs. We've had Heaven's Gate and Hale-Bopp, the 50th anniversary of the Roswell crash--where, in early July, about 100,000 Americans gathered after the release of the third, revised official Air Force explanation of what really happened back in 1947--Independence Day, Contact, Men in Black, and the ever-hardy X-Files. There's also been international speculation about life on Mars, the recent Pathfinder mission to the red planet, and the ongoing research of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) with its small band of scientists tuning their 8-million channel radio wave detectors to the skies.
    Aliens have landed, even if they haven't. A 1996 Newsweek poll confirmed that nearly half of Americans believe UFOs are real and that the government has covered up the evidence, and 29 percent of the population is convinced we've already made contact with ETs. Is this a cultural spasm in response to the approaching millennium? Or is our relentless fascination with UFOs more deeply rooted?
    I thought the scientists who'd been studying the phenomenon might know, and some of them were convening in Las Vegas at the annual conference of the Society for Scientific Exploration, a haven for researchers with respectable credentials and wild ideas. My plan: Spend a few days at the conference, then visit Dreamland.
    The day before I left New York, I had two interviews that almost prepared me for the utter weirdness I was about to encounter. The first was with an éminence grise of the field, who refused to be interviewed on the record. I said I wanted to get the `real' story and he burst into laughter. "If you can do that, darling, you'll have accomplished something not one of us has been able to do in the last 40 years. Back in the late '50s it was relatively clear that ETs in nuts-and-bolts ships that defied the laws of gravity were scanning nuclear development plants and that they [had] crashed. But the field has since turned into one big snarl. Nobody knows anything for sure, and if they do, the minute they say it about 10 others say it's bullshit." His favorite UFO pastime these days, he commented, was to take a long hot bath while reading a hilarious `zine called Saucer Smear.
    A few hours later I spoke with Stephen Greer, an emergency room physician who founded CSETI (the `C' stands for Center, but the organization is unrelated to SETI), and who claims to have communicated with aliens. Some highlights of his bizarre two-hour monologue: According to one naval physicist, aliens are being shot down by Area 51's arrogant `cowboys using unimaginable technologies'; after the Roswell crash, our scientists reverse-engineered the technology of the spaceships, but if they came forward to tell the truth `they would be killed and the president of the U.S. couldn't protect them'; a consortium of fringe religious groups and private corporations with alien technology has banded together to interface with people's minds and induce `psychomotor paralysis, terror, and dread'; Greer himself has supposedly met with Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and CIA officials and identified `125 deep-throat witnesses' who know secret information about UFOs. In conclusion: `This is one of the biggest stories in the history of the human race.'

Touchdown In Vegas
    Science has long been a strange mistress of the military--and our high-tech arabesques of the last few decades dance right into the public's fears and fantasies about UFOs. But at the conference, not one of the UFO researchers I questioned would talk. As John Petersen, an engineer and president of the Arlington Institute, a think tank in Virginia, said: `You'd have to stay on this story for a year, make friends with all these guys, and then they'd only talk off the record anyway.'
    Another scientist who refused to be named explained: "Remember that phrase that was popular in the '60s and '70s, the military-industrial complex? Well, there actually is such a thing. Once you've worked for the National Security Agency or the CIA, you don't stop. You can't get out. You know too much and you're too valuable. People in intelligence and the military come to have a kind of haunted look. It's a strange world where you have to be wary all the time."
    Kind of makes you wonder. And then you start wondering some more. The presentations the UFO researchers gave at the conference were at best sophomoric; in private discussions attendees called them `UFO 101.' Most of the reports discussed findings or cases that the researchers had been familiar with for years. So why were these guys gathering in Vegas, a desert city born out of a mafioso's wet dream?
    Very far off the record, a questionable source told me that the conference emcee, John Alexander, Ph.D., (formerly director of non-lethal weapons research at Los Alamos and now head of the National Institute for Discovery Research [NIDS], a foundation created by Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow), was a `prince of darkness' and part of an `end-of-the-world cult portraying alien abductions as a demonic phenomenon necessitating a holy war.' Again off the record, but from a less fanatical source, a physicist and I stood talking outside the Monte Carlo Hotel and Casino in the 100 degree desert sun, and he explained that the scientists wouldn't talk to me because they were embarrassed about their funding sources, especially Bigelow, who had bought NIDS a stellar board of scientists, astronauts, generals, and former CIA officials. Bigelow was said to have garnered the cream of the `Aviary'--supposedly an informal network of CIA guys who'd donned bird nicknames (Alexander had been known as the Penguin), as well as a former general who'd been in charge of Reagan's `Star Wars' program.
    Bigelow had apparently just bought land in Utah where there were rumored UFO sightings. Or maybe the guy just likes Utah. There are as many UFO conspiracy theories as there are galaxies that might have generated them. Take, for instance, the cadres of true-believers who insist that bizarre cattle mutilations in the Southwest--documented by filmmaker/writer Linda Moulton Howe--are not the work of hungry aliens given carte blanche by our willing government in exchange for technology, but are actually created by our government to fuel our own UFO paranoia and distract us from the real aliens housed in underground tunnels at military bases. It has also been said that every single technological leap of the last 40 years--from the transistor radio to satellite telecommunications, superconductors, and computer chips--has been reverse-engineered from crashed spaceships.
    Information and disinformation. Those two words keep the entire spectrum of UFO tales maddeningly alive: If it's not genuine information, it's calculated disinformation. As Marc Barasch, a contributing editor to this magazine who is working on a UFO documentary, put it in an e-mail, `Everyone thinks everyone else is a disinformation agent. And there's always the logic: if you were sitting on the most explosive secret on the planet, wouldn't you, Government X, do everything you could to keep it--sparing no expense and using any grotesque subterfuge? Who knows? Trust no one. You gotta be a little nuts and alienated in the first place to devote your life to this subject''

Rest stop in Rachel
    I ditched the conference a day early. Immense Nevada skies opened out before me, and after a few hours I passed the first sign for the `Extraterrestrial Highway'--so named last year by the state's governor--two lanes stretching like dust-coated taffy into the scrub brush and mountains.
    What was I going to encounter in Rachel and Groom Lake? According to George Friedman, director of research at Baton Rouge's Strategic Forecasting LLC and author of The Future of War (Crown), I was heading to a strange place. The fractured hall of mirrors you find in the UFO field may have more to do with the Cold War than close encounters. In fact, says Friedman, it can be traced back to a single starting point, a single moment in time: the morning of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor:
    "They planned it in secret and they smashed us. From that moment on we've been obsessed with secrecy. And then our scientists invented the atomic bomb and won World War II. [We had] all these soldiers fighting, and some pencil-necked geeks came up with a weapon that made the soldiers irrelevant. America decided it had to stockpile scientists. Spend what you want, but give us weapons in secrecy." Thus the marriage of science, industry, and the military, at sites like Area 51.
    But secrecy tends to blast away accountability (see Secret Science & Criminal Acts, at bottom). And it's the perfect foil for conspiracy theories. In one sense, UFOs fit into that good old American conspiracy tradition that would have Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK shot by aliens paid by Congress under orders from the CIA.
    Is it any coincidence that flying saucers first appeared shortly after the Cold War began--in June of 1947, when pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine bright discs in the sky near Mount Rainier in Washington? Says Friedman, "There's no limit on our imaginations. We already know what amazing things have come out of secret projects. These scientists seem like magicians working black magic in the desert. They already seem to playing with the very substance of nature and producing these terrible weapons. Go back to the very ancient myth of the Faustian pact. We've decided that scientists and the government are in league with the devil, in order to gain knowledge of the entire universe. And there you have Roswell. Aliens landed. Scientists made a deal."
    Did scientists make a deal? Conspiracy theorists reason that the government kept ETs a secret to prevent the kind of mass hysteria once generated by Orson Welles' War of the Worlds. `This is a land of 30-year mortgages,' says Dean Radin, Ph.D., former chair of the Vegas conference, director of the Consciousness Research Laboratory at the University of Nevada, and author of The Conscious Universe (HarperCollins). 'People want security.'
    'It may turn out there is a devil and they did make a pact," says Friedman. "But from what I know of the Air Force they would shriek at the top of their lungs, `Aliens have landed, we need $50 billion to build anti-alien ships.' It would be a budgetary coup of mammoth proportions."
    Friedman isn't the only one concerned about government secrecy. In March of this year, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave a speech at Georgetown University noting that excess government secrecy had accelerated conspiracy theories involving the government. And Congress announced that it will hold a hearing to review America's system of government secrecy in the post-Cold War period. No wonder: The federal Information Security Oversight Office has estimated that the government created about 6.8 million official secrets last year.

Offshore Island of The Soul
    At last I arrive in Rachel--though I only know because 40 tin mailboxes mounted on wooden posts suddenly pop out of the emptiness. An American flag flies near one of the two houses in `town.' The other residents live in trailers like the banana-colored one that boasts a sign, Area 51 Research Center, and a garden of debris recovered from crashed stealth bombers.
    The Area 51 Research Center is run by 37-year-old Glenn Campbell, who is wired to the Web and known for his witty news items about UFOs and local lore. Inside I find Steve Phipps, a 39-year-old military buff who has lived here for the last year. He confirms the local legends: People from all over America gather at a certain black mailbox to watch for UFOs, although the rancher who owns the mailbox has since painted it white and plated it with armor. Sightings are frequent, but who can say what is seen? After all, war games are played in the air nearby, says Phipps: "You see the planes and then there's this sonic boom, a wall of sound hitting you."
    I thumb through a book on stealth aircraft. They're lethal steel moths, gorgeous, shining, and flat. "These could easily be mistaken for flying saucers."
    "And they often are."
    We go for a Coke a hundred yards away, at the only restaurant for about 50 miles: the Little A'Le'Inn. It's a converted trailer, operated by Pat and Joe Travis--she overweight with short, cropped hair, he slim and wizened by drink and sun.
    "People come here to escape and live by their own rules," says Steve. "But nobody can get along. Glenn is feuding with Pat and Joe. The town patriarch is suffering from Alzheimer's and the matriarch is a southern belle who's as mean as they come. There's a 57-year-old former secretary from Ohio who married a 27-year-old. She killed a man and wants to die in a shoot-out. You should write a piece on the psychology of Rachel."
    Somebody introduces me to Chuck Clark, an amateur astronomer who moved here in 1994. Clean shaven, with blue eyes and an ebulliently vacant smile, Chuck tells me he saw nine UFOs in California in 1957. He watches stars and spaceships. "I like to go out and chase the guys with guns at Area 51. They have quite an extensive file on me."
    Outside the inn, crafting a garden of marigolds, I find Bill, a 40-something Californian. "I'm just an underwater photographer and a garden guy," he says, but then goes on to explain the physics behind alien craft: "See this trowel? It's made of electrons moving at huge speeds. Slow those electrons down, the trowel will become lighter and lighter. Until it levitates." He starts to cough. "I've been coughing for four days. Yesterday some joker said they put plutonium in my mashed potatoes, and I'm starting to wonder."
    Finally, I meet Glenn Campbell. He seems both smart and sane (and is only a part-time resident). "I can confirm or deny nothing," he greets me with a laugh. I ask him about a local who supposedly works at Area 51 and leaks secrets. "I don't think so," Glenn says. "He's always walking around in an Air Force uniform. No ex-Air Force guy would ever do that."
    That night, at 2 a.m., there is supposed to be a war game in the sky. Bill has put a scanning gizmo on top of his car. "Nothing's happening," he says, restless. "I think I'll go down to the border and see what I can pick up." The border is the where the base begins. Cross it, and you'll be fined.
    "I've got my beamer," says Chuck. "I could shine it on these guys right on the forehead where a bullet would go."
    And so we sit in the cool desert night, on a makeshift wooden stoop. One could say that Rachel is just Nevada's twist on any godforsaken outpost, but this particular one is mirroring the culture at large. The emptiness here may not be much different from the emptiness the rest of America fills with the X-Files every Sunday night: It's just heavier and brighter in Dreamland. Still, there's a relentless immortality to the UFO myth, and no story can be immortal if it doesn't sink deep roots in our psyches.

UFOs As Modern Myth
    "I view the entire UFO field as an archetype in the making," Dean Radin says. "We're seeing a modern myth here that has roots in the beginning of history." Consider the reports of alien kidnappings that are a hallmark of UFO lore. According to folklorist Peter M. Rojcewicz, chairman of interdivisional liberal arts at the Julliard School, abduction tales are archetypes running through most cultures. The devil and werewolf lure, abduct, and murder children; fairies snatch youngsters and leave behind changelings, sometimes taking blood samples; Haitian voodoo tradition tells of sorcerers known as `zobop' that travel in `tiger cars' flashing bluish beams while kidnapping humans. Black helicopters have been sighted in conjunction with modern-day UFOs, but 15th-century art depicts black whirling objects as well. Even the early Gnostics described whirling globes of light.
    "If aliens were objectively real," says Dennis Stillings, editor of Healing Island magazine, 'then they could only be explained as joy-riding, bumbling oafs of limited intelligence who have stolen the sophisticated craft of another civilization, because nothing they do makes sense. They seem unable to perform the simplest procedures without creating severe pain and anxiety. They should be capable of teleporting tissue samples, at the very least. They have no style. They don't dress well." Aliens, Stillings believes, are merely religious archetypes: "There are great similarities between religious images and UFOs."
    As archetypes, UFOs' power and persistence--and their current popularity--makes sense. "These kinds of archetypes come to the surface at times of great cultural transition," explains Boulder psychologist Bernice Hill, Ph.D. "It's a movement in the collective unconscious." Just what kind of movement? "I take the flying saucer to be an image of the future state of humanity," says Terrance McKenna, author of Food for the Gods (Bantam). "The soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space."
    Or if not the soul itself, then a hunger for it. UFOs are post-modern folklore cloaked in technology, mirroring our hubris, our wax wings, and Faustian pact. They come trailing meaning like a comet. At any time, they might arrive, just come at us out of empty space. And isn't that what those scientists dancing with the devil promised? Science says that space looks empty but is really full, that on a subatomic level it is rushing and frothing like a waterfall. A cup of coffee contains enough stored energy to evaporate the world's oceans.
    I think back to Bill, turning to me at 2 in the morning. "Do you like crystals?" he asked wistfully. "I like to go into the mountains and find stones. They're prehistoric. It feels neat to hold them. I don't know if they have powers or anything." Search for it in stones, coffee cups, flying saucers--the impulse to hold and behold magic is the same.
    I leave Rachel at 11 the next morning, and drive for hours, falling into the desert. Pre-Cambrian rocks. I keep thinking, "I'm driving on the bottom of the ocean floor in the desert sun." The oxymoron feels right. And then I see Vegas in the distance, its casinos a crazy mirage of the Sphinx (with her sad showgirl's face, as a friend described it), the pyramid at Giza, and the skyline of New York--the whole arc of civilization playfully mocked. All whittled down to a few colorful toys stacked in the sandbox of the desert, lost before the mute, harsh circumference of those breathtaking mountains. How brief our history in the face of eternity--and how much we long to be spirited away.