To still others, Area 51 implied craft from beyond our planet, recovered in secrecy from desert crash sites or bequeathed in secret treaties with extraterrestrials — craft we were trying to learn how to fly ourselves. For some of the most extreme conspiracists, it was a place controlled by aliens: There had been a shoot-out, the darkest of the stories held, and the aliens who once dined side by side with earthlings in the base cafeteria were now in total control. Or perhaps, a final school argued, it was a place of the grandest deception, a shadowbox of saucer stories playing themselves out in a Punch-and-Judy performance designed to make us accept a final earthly tyranny.
Most of the flying saucers or mysterious lights were simply flares, the military argued, used to decoy missiles or illuminate targets at night, and it was plain that some were also landing lights seen through the distance of the rippling desert air. “Yeah, they are unidentified and they fly,” one skeptic told me, “and they are sent by a mysterious alien civilization — the Pentagon.”
But those watching for secret planes and those watching for alien craft appeared alike in their fascination and their procedures, in their careful accumulation of bits of knowledge, their descriptions of sightings, and, above all, their elusive dreams of a clear view, a clear video image, a clear photograph. “Mystery Aircraft,” a 1992 report by the Federation of American Scientists, had observed a striking similarity between the spotters of secret planes and the UFO watchers. The FAS was dedicated to investigating Pentagon waste and excessive military secrecy, but now it had crossed into a new realm of philosophy and cultural analysis to argue that “it is useful to consider mystery aircraft not simply as an engineering product, but also as a sociological and epistemological phenomenon.”
What had happened to Dreamland was a parable about knowledge and secrecy, about assembling facts and bits of information into a pattern, about learning and speculation. It was about what the Area 51 watcher known as PsychoSpy called “the nature of truth” but was perhaps closer to the opposite: the absence of certain truth and the abundance of uncertain lore, legend, and just plain “rumint,” as the watchers on the Ridge liked to call it, echoing the military intelligence terms “photint,” for photographic, “elint” for electronic, and “humint” for human forms of intelligence. “The signal-to-noise ratio is very low here,” one stealth chaser told me. Or as Steve, the master Interceptor, put it in his Texas Panhandle locution, “It’s awful tough to pick the pepper out of the shit.”
It was about mystery engendering fantasy. It was like one of those empty spaces in the unexplored interiors of continents that medieval cartographers had imaginatively supplied with dragons and other monsters.
I had driven up from Las Vegas past the F-15s, F-16s, and B-1Bs landing and taking off at Nellis Air Force Base. A billboard for an upcoming air show at the base, sponsored by a large casino, promised “An American Dream Come True.” The desert seemed like low-res detail on a flight simulator game: RISC landscape. This was the country for which God made cruise control. If you kept your eyes on the horizon, you barely seemed to move, so slowly did the distant perspective change. You had to focus on the shoulder, with its blur of sage and silver mileposts, to sense any progress.
Sometimes on that shoulder, sometimes on the road in front, my humped cartoon shadow ran ahead and reminded me of the exaggerated shadows of lunar or Mars landers, taking their own silhouetted pictures on some distant dry surface. After miles of tilted slabs of stone, striated like nicely cooked bacon, the only green area was a shock. The Pahranagat Valley looked like a dark Gothic 1840s vision of heaven, full of funeral urns and weeping willows, Protestant hymns and early deaths from typhoid. With its shallow lakes dotted with birds, it offered the richest land for hundreds of miles around. In the nineteenth century, horse rustlers used it to fatten animals stolen in Nevada, California, Utah, and even Arizona.
Past the valley, I came to the little town of Alamo, where someone wanted to sell a decrepit café, then climbed a long, looping stretch of road that crested in a high pass called Hancock Summit, where the road began to descend and the view opened ahead. I caught my breath as suddenly the curtain came up on a vast open westward view across a rising plain. A dusty white stick appeared pointing straight up in the air. A second later I recognized it as a gravel road, running so straight and so far and so directly up a slope miles away that in the perspective it seemed like a pole of swirling dust, no longer attached to the land but rising from it like a tightly spun tornado or dust devil.
This, I realized, was Groom Road, the cars sending up contrails of dust as they moved steadily down then up the slung valley, visible mile after mile but barely seeming to make any progress. It was the road that ran up over the Jumbled Hills into Dreamland.
We assembled at the trailhead in full view of the DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED and PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED signs, beside the motor home that PsychoSpy, the self-appointed watchdog, ombudsman, and tour guide of Area 51, had made his base.
PsychoSpy was Glenn Campbell, author of The Area 51 Viewer’s Guide, organizer of the Whitesides Defense Committee, publisher of the Desert Rat newsletter, the man who had discovered the closest and most accessible viewpoint. He named it “Freedom Ridge” and was delighted when he heard the local guards using that name on their radios. Once you could walk almost up to the base. But after too many curious citizens, including Greenpeace demonstrators protesting at the adjoining nuclear test site, had disturbed their privacy, the Air Force in 1984 went to the Bureau of Land Management, then to Congress, and had large tracts of public land around the base declared part of the Nellis Air Force Base Bomb and Gunnery Range. But two high points, which allowed a glimpse of the base to intrepid hikers, had remained accessible. By the late eighties, the spot began to draw crowds and television crews. That’s when the legend began.
Now, in October 1993, the Air Force was applying to take over the viewpoints at Freedom Ridge, and Whitesides Mountain, too. We were heading for Freedom Ridge before it closed for a last chance to look into Dreamland.
Hiking up to Freedom Ridge, we dodged the brambly, fragrant sage and the fuzzy, Muppet-like Joshua trees and crossed rocks that seemed inscribed in some alien cuneiform. The perimeter of the base was marked by orange signposts running across the high desert and, on the other side of the barrier, strange-looking silver balls, the size of basketballs, on poles. The lore held that they were motion detectors or other sensors. Some claim that, thanks to ammonia sensors, these can sniff the difference between a human and a wandering cow or Rocky Mountain sheep. In any case, the exclusion of the public has made Dreamland a de facto wildlife preserve.
I had heard about the sensors and the video cameras and the road sensors, triggered by the weight of a passing vehicle. Helicopters would sweep along the border at sunrise to pick up anyone who had spent the night and sometimes “sandblast” them with downwash from the rotors. I had also heard of the men on the other side of the barrier, in their camouflage uniforms and white Jeep Cherokees, known locally as “camou dudes,” who kept an eye on intruders and called in the local sheriff if any crossed the border.