Significantly, Aurora as an imaginary aircraft could have had some of the effects of an actual plane. It could, for example, have made potential enemies aware that they could be observed at any moment. Did whoever named the craft Aurora know about the Texas town and its tale? Was this an inside joke, deliberate political disinformation?
By the mid-nineties a flock of new high-speed aircraft came into the open. One was called LoFlyte, a so-called waverider. And when Lockheed Martin received a contract to build the X-33, the hypersonic suborbital aircraft, Skunkers became suspicious. The promised delivery date and comparatively low bid suggested that Lockheed had technology already available — possibly from Aurora — to give it a head start. Was the X-33 simply the “white” version of Aurora?
If there was no Aurora, or nothing like it, why were buildings going up so fast at Area 51? Why were Wall Street analysts pointing to large, mysterious sources of income in Lockheed’s annual reports? Why were Lockheed’s parking lots full? What was it that needed a six-mile runway across Groom Lake, in Dreamland? Questions like these, as much as the tales of Lazar’s saucers, drew the curious in greater and greater numbers to the perimeter of Area 51.
5. Maps
The Little A“ Le”Inn did a good business in maps — bought from the government and significantly marked up. Naturally they did not show the base over the Ridge.
The fascination Dreamland radiated began with the fact that for years it did not officially exist. A map I bought at the Bureau of Land Management office in Las Vegas did not show it. The 1:100,000 metric scale, 30 × 60 minute map from 1985 claimed to display “highways, roads and other man-made structures” but bore no signs of runways, hangars, or the buildings that housed hundreds of workers and engineers at the base. But why should Dreamland be on the map? It was after all not a real but an imagined place, a virtual landscape, a “notional” land, and its map was to be found drawn not on the ground but on the mind.
Groom Lake and Dreamland were part of a wider map of secret facilities, mystery spots that represent a significant portion of tax dollars at work: air bases and test sites, controlled airspaces and anonymous buildings housing research facilities. It belongs to the same cultural landscape as the nuclear labs in Los Alamos and Sandia, New Mexico, the Blue Cube in Sunnyvale, California, which controls spy satellites, the CIA training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, and the National Reconnaissance Office’s headquarters outside of Washington, D.C. — the “stealth building” kept secret from Congress even while under construction. Many of these facilities make up the Southwest Test and Training Range Complex, which runs from White Sands and Fort Huachuca in the south to the Utah Test and Training Range in the north. Included are the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards, the best known, most open of the areas, even including the closed-off “North Base,” and China Lake, the Navy’s radar and electronic test site to the north and east of Edwards. There is a difference, though: All these other facilities have long been acknowledged.
Dreamland had no edges — the Minister’s phrase kept coming back to me. But it had ties and umbilicals to Edwards, to the contractors in Las Vegas, to the Air Force labs at Wright Patterson in Dayton. The ties reached all the way back to the Pentagon, whose shape has transformed from that of an old star-shaped fort into an icon of the new military-industrial complex. I thought of the whole network of facilities that were kin to Dreamland as a mysterious distant land: Pentagonia, marked with its own patterns, somehow similar to the Dreamings of the aboriginal peoples of Australia; or as an expanding metropolis, a ghost metro area with its own suburbs, industrial parks, malls.
Dreamland was born of the culture of secrecy; its owners — the Department of Energy and before that the Atomic Energy Commission, on the one hand, and the Air Force on the other — sat at the junction of the twin ideologies of nuclear power and airpower. This invisible culture cast a great shadow, which was the culture of ufology — the antimatter of the matter.
I tried to create a mind-map of Dreamland, based on certain marketing presentations I had seen. A car maker, for instance, might mind-map the image of a vehicle. One axis — latitude — would mark “sporty” versus “practical” while another — longitude — might distinguish a range of impressions from “luxury” to “basic transportation.” It seemed to me you could mind-map the cultures of the world of nukes and the world of airpower in a way that could neatly correspond with the overlaps of the test site and the Nellis range on the physical map.
In time I tried to map, too, the mind-sets of those on the Ridge: “Believe secret airplanes are being tested” on a line with “Believe alien technology is being tested.” The youfers and the Interceptors would be at either pole. In the middle were a surprising number of people who bought into both — and even more who were simply tempted to believe.
The other axis would distinguish “those who think it ought to remain secret” from “those who want it opened as much as possible.” Oddly enough, by the mid-nineties I was hearing the youfers cluster at the first end of the axis, with Huff and Lear saying they now thought it should all remain closed, the whole story kept down because people weren’t ready, couldn’t deal with it.
The closer you got, the harder it was to see. It became a cliché that everyone saw from the Ridge what they wanted to see: “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.” To see the whole thing you had to step away, and look from many perspectives, through many eyes.
Still, I studied the mint and mocha shades of the Coast and Geodetic Survey maps and looked at the official tourist map of Nevada, with its upbeat registration of ghost towns. I put my hands on maps from the Defense Mapping Agency as well as the Federal Aviation Administration aerial charts with their landscape of ochers and burnt yellow hatched with the purple edges of restricted military operations areas like blackberry juice stains or old, fading bruises. The signal stations — VORs — for aviation guidance were rendered as gear-toothed compass wheels.
One afternoon I stopped by the state historical museum in Las Vegas. There was a display on the Shoshone tribes who originally lived in the area. Beside a panoramic photograph of Tonopah, the town north of Dreamland proper, in the heyday of the silver boom — a collection of mine tailings and shacks and a hotel bearing a Bull Durham ad — hung a map promoting the Tonopah and Tidewater railroad, the brainchild of Francis “Borax” Smith. Smith replaced the famed twenty-mule teams hauling borax from the mines around Trona with trains, and they still ran. In Mojave I had many times heard the Trona train rumbling through in the middle of the night, a seemingly endless succession of low dark ore cars coming in from the northeast.
The landscape of nearly a hundred years ago looked more inhabited and detailed, packed with mines and claims and crisscrossing railroads. In the map’s legend, the twin T’s of the railroad name were cleverly eye-punned into twin T-rails. I was shocked to see no boundaries across the map — no dotted perimeters, no shaded restricted areas, no overlapping colors — so used had I become to maps of restricted spaces.
I looked at every map I could find. I even “flew” over the lake and the mountains on a CD-ROM map that could show any part of the landscape of the country in three dimensions. I flew over the mountains from the area of the Black Mailbox, moved up the Groom Road, then over the hills, zooming along the runway and past the hangars, neither of which were marked, and turning to cross over Bald Mountain with a sickening plunge like a roller coaster’s. I turned on the terrain-following feature and, nosing down, saw it all dissolve as proximity overwhelmed the program’s resolution and individual pixels grew into colored angular shapes, into facets like those of a stealth plane. Finally, the screen turned as blank as the maps were before the miners and military arrived.