Phil Patton
Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51
At the Boneyard
“You didn’t see that,” the officer said.
We were walking amid aircraft in the Arizona desert. It was a boneyard, like the one in the famous scene in the film The Best Years of Our Lives, where planes await the day they will either fly again — perhaps for some Third World air patrol — or be crushed in great machines and melted down into pure aluminum. Hundreds of acres of aircraft shimmered silver in the desert sun south of Tucson — an elephants’ graveyard of planes. Military police in blue berets and shiny black boots driving blue pickup trucks patrolled the perimeters. German shepherds rode with them.
The commander of the facility talked too much. It was not a big career builder, this command, and he talked endlessly about how important the job they did here was, that it was like a blood bank for aircraft parts, not a graveyard. He hated the word graveyard. I suspected he had been given this job because he talked too much.
We walked down the long aisles of Vietnam-era F-105s, their canopies bandaged white like eye-surgery patients, the tiger teeth painted on their noses dulled, the red stars commemorating downed MiGs chipped and peeling. Wherever exposed, the Plexiglas of windows and canopies was scratched, dulled, cataracted. The sun had blistered and flaked the colorful unit symbols, faded the elaborate, delicate green-and-brown mottling of camouflage, and smeared the standard-issue military stencils, NO STEP and RESCUE.
We passed green oxygen tanks stacked in pyramids like cannonballs, ejection seats lined up in a phantom theater, white radomes piled like dinosaur eggs, the black cubes of old altimeters.
There were planes I knew only from putting together models of them in my childhood. Hellcat, Avenger, Hustler, Starfighter, Voodoo, Thunderchief. Aggressive names a kid would like.
In an area they called “the Back Forty” sat acres of B-52s, their backs broken open to reveal green innards. A clown chorus of bulb-nosed helicopters grinned at us as we walked by. Grass and sagebrush had grown knee-high among flattened tires. Birds nested behind ailerons and flaps, jackrabbits lived in jet intakes. Even in broad daylight, the Back Forty is a ghostly place. It’s the noise, the creaking of old aluminum, the writhing rustle in the wind of dangling metal and spaghetti wire, the low whistle of an occasional breeze.
I met a man who had worked in the boneyard for thirty years. He was from Waco, Texas, and his skin had been cured to a leathery red-brown by grease and dust and sun. He paused from his work and said, “I always make sure to slap the side of an airplane with a wrench or something to scare out the rattlers and bull snakes and Gila monsters before I get too close.”
He was removing an engine. “Some days,” he said, “it gets so hot out we have to keep the tools in buckets of cold water just so we can pick them up.
“This whole field used to be covered with ’36s,” he said — B-36s, the huge bombers that flew over my house when I was a child, growing up during the Cold War, under the aegis of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) and the eagle vision of Curtis E. LeMay. “Had to bring smelters right out here in the field to sweat ’em down. They were too big to move. For days there were columns of black smoke.”
Other craft are dragged to the edge of the field, then chopped by guillotine into parts small enough for the smelter, a huge piece of machinery. At its base, the oven emits a liquid as bright as mercury, as thin as water, coursing thinner than you expect metal ever to flow. Molten is too thick and stolid a word for this metal, which quickly cools in ingots that are shipped off to be turned into auto parts, pots and pans, folding lawn chairs.
I spent a whole day at the boneyard. Near the end of it, I caught sight of something in the corner of my vision, a black shape, like a big engine with vestigial wings, with no windows or canopy — no face — no wheels, its shape biological, aquatic perhaps. It seemed greedy and insensate like a deep-ocean-dwelling creature, with the hungry mouth of a ramjet front, as sinister and mysterious as if it had come from another world altogether.
“You didn’t see that,” the base commander and tour guide said evenly. We paused and looked for a while, then moved on.
I did not know it yet, but I had seen my first piece of Dreamland.
1. On the Ridge
Beyond the Jumbled Hills, in the wide Emigrant Valley of southern Nevada, bracketed by the Timpahute and Pahranagat ranges, lies Groom Lake, just one of many dry lakes that dot the desert reaches of Nevada and California, an expanse of white, hard alkaline soil — caliche soil. Rocky Mountain sheep and wild burros often wander onto its surface, and for years the bare weathered horned skull of a sheep sat here, a Western cliché as accent mark. Relentless winds lift small pebbles and drive them across the surface. Once or twice a year, a couple of inches of rain leave a thin liquid layer, a mock lake, shimmering and wavy, whose evaporation rapidly smoothes it to a high polish. The land sat like this for centuries before the asphalt and metal buildings, the wooden barracks and hangars, arrived, turning it into the Shangri-la, the Forbidden Temple of black, or secret, aircraft.
Groom Lake is set inside 4,742 square miles of restricted airspace, and nearly four million acres of bomb range — a space as big as a Benelux nation. It would come to be called by many names: Groom Lake, Watertown, Paradise Ranch, Home Base, Area 51. But the name for the airspace above the lake and the secret test facility and base that would grow there was, irresistibly, “Dreamland.” It was this airspace that made it special, the airspace where strange craft appeared and disappeared like whims and suspicions, where speculations like airships glowed and hovered, then zipped off into the distance.
For years it had remained virtually unknown to the public that paid for it, its very existence denied by the government agencies and military contractors that ran it. It was illegal for those who worked inside to speak of it. And fighter pilots flying out of nearby Nellis Air Force Base were forbidden to cross into the Dreamland airspace. They called it “the Box,” and if they strayed into it they were interrogated and grounded.
The most famous planes known to have flown at Dreamland were those created by the legendary Lockheed Skunk Works, established by Kelly Johnson. Yet Johnson’s successor as the head of the Skunk Works, Ben Rich, told me shortly before his death in 1994, “I can’t even say ‘Groom Lake.’ ” To those in the know it was simply “the Ranch,” or “the remote location.”
A child of the Cold War, growing up fascinated with the mystique of aircraft, I knew the legend already: Here was where the U-2 first flew, and the SR-71 Blackbird and the F-117 Stealth fighter — all in secret. For years only a few grainy pictures of the place — taken surreptitiously from distant ridges or by satellites — served to prove its existence.
On the ridge above Dreamland, I would find I was not alone. Far from it. My fascination was shared by many others — airplane buffs, Skunkers, stealth chasers, Interceptors, like my friend Steve from Texas, like the journalist called the Minister of Words, guys with code names like Trader, Agent X, Zero, Bat, Fox, and others who gathered here, trying to find out about rumored, occasionally sighted, or speculated-upon planes called Aurora, Black Manta, Goldie, and “the mother ship.”
Here, too, I encountered the UFO buffs—“the youfers,” I would call them. By the late eighties, when a man named Bob Lazar emerged, claiming to have seen and worked on captured flying saucers, Area 51 had become one of the world’s best-known UFO shrines.
To some it was the battlefield where the Cold War had been won, an antiwar fought with antiweapons: spy planes like the U-2 that saved us in Cuba in October 1962, or the Blackbird that defused the superpower confrontation in the Mideast in 1973. To one veteran, perhaps cynical, observer of the Pentagon, it was the symbol of a black world run amok, a cult of secrecy grown obsessive, “a secret city,” “the last great preserve of cold warriors, a symbol for that wonderful secret world, a testament to how much fun it was to build hugely expensive planes and save the world.” To another watcher who was obsessed by all the strange craft in the air, it was a site where “we are flight-testing vehicles that defy description, things so far beyond comprehension as to be really alien to our way of thinking.”