So I kept my eye on the edge, marked with those strange silver balls, until the path rose more steeply and, surprisingly soon, we reached the top. And there it was: I thought of the moment in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea when Nemo’s men reach the crest of the atoll and suddenly see dozens of toiling figures down in the circular harbor.
It was all in sharper detail than I had anticipated. The base unfolded beneath us — a line of buildings, fuel tanks, an old bus, the big radar dish, an old bus, and a seven-mile runway — as well as the white horizontal of the dry lake itself. A Jeep came up the road far in the distance, then turned around after a while and left.
I kept finding myself looking back in the other direction, over the valley to the east where the long dirt road puffed up in dust as an occasional car passed. The rooster tails hung in the air a long time. The only black birds we saw were ravens — at sunset eight or a dozen spiraled in formation in the thermals at the edge of the rocks.
The ridge at the top was narrow, with a back like a whale, scattered with rocks and tufts of grass and the dead stalks of Joshua trees. It was impossible to pitch tents and hard to find flat places out of the wind wide enough for a sleeping bag. The rocks were black as if a fire had singed them.
I worked to wedge my sleeping bag in between the rocks before dark made it impossible to move. I sorted my gear: My flashlight still bore the masking tape that had identified it at summer camp as my daughter’s. My rations were Yuppie MREs (Meals Ready to Eat): Power Bars and trail mix, with a self-indulgent Hershey bar thrown in.
I stood gazing quietly down at the base. “If there are extraterrestrials,” the heavy man beside me said, “it would be the greatest discovery in human history. It would be an intellectual crime not to investigate.” He was stern, almost lecturing. He had that chip on his shoulder common to conspiracy buffs. “Please let me finish,” he would say too quickly when someone interjected an objection or comment.
We had all agreed not to carry cameras to the Ridge, but now he pulled one out and began snapping pictures. The fine print on the signs also forbade “sketching or drawing” the base, so the notebook and pen I carried would in theory make me equally subject to arrest.
“People get nervous when you mention the idea of extraterrestrials,” he went on, while looking through his camera lens. The discovery of life on another planet would shake people’s fundamental philosophical and religious assumptions, he said. It would demolish the conceit that we were the be-all and end-all of creation.
But it occurred to me: Rather than how would we explain the existence of other life forms to ourselves, how would we explain ourselves to them? What would they make of us? How could we sum up life here, give a summary of our situation now and the events of the previous half century?
The very possibility of such an encounter, like the prospect of Dreamland stretching out before us, suggested that the exercise of accounting for ourselves was a useful one: What exactly would we say to them? Would we explain the atomic bomb and the Cold War, the facing off of two earthly powers and the near destruction of the planet? Or, stranger yet, would we tell of the end of that war, and the deprivation many felt from its lack, the need for an enemy to define ourselves against?
Dreamland seemed an exemplary place to do this. I came to believe that its legend and lore, its language and paradoxes, provided a strange yet appropriate time capsule of a half century of cold war and black secrecy. Here, the cultures of nuclear power and airpower merged with the folklores of extraterrestrials and earthly conspiracies; their interference patterns formed a moiré of the weird. It was a place from which to see our own planet with the eyes of an outsider.
What you called the place revealed what you thought was flying there, and told who you were, just as whether you called a group of islands the Malvinas or the Falklands, whether you said “West Bank” or “Judea and Samaria” told who you were. People from the Skunk Works called it the Ranch or the remote location. At Nellis Air Force Base, it was the Box, or Red Square. And to hear someone refer to it as Area 51, the name used by the Atomic Energy Commission since the 1950s, meant that his interest was in the saucers. Beneath all these names, the place offered glimpses into the overlapping cultures of UFO lore, of Stealth craft, of nuclear energy and espionage, and into a world whose common ground was secrecy.
It was a think tank for Cold War engineering, but with the end of the Cold War — a war that produced its own versions of shell shock and battle fatigue — Dreamland was the center of a great network now in ruins.
Dreamland was the tabloid edge of technology, aptly sited near Las Vegas: It is to technology what Las Vegas is to the everyday economy. It was about playing the long odds. The engineers inside the hangars along Groom Lake were looking for “silver bullets,” aiming to strike it rich with superplanes, to hit the jackpot of invincibility. The players were the most important ones in the military-industrial complex: Bechtel, E-Systems, TRW, Hughes, Lockheed, SAIC, and, perhaps the least known of all, EG&G.
Standing on the Ridge picking up lore, I learned about the company called Edgerton, Germeshausen & Grier (EG&G), which did all sorts of things at the test site, from photography to security. The company’s founder, Harold Edgerton, was the MIT physicist and photo whiz best known for his stroboscopic photos of bullets passing through apples and milk drops caught in midsplash. He used this technique to photograph atomic explosions for the military and soon his company was providing a variety of services to the Air Force, to the CIA, and then to the Atomic Energy Commission. EG&G has a building at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas from which it operates the so-called Janet Airline of 727s that ferry workers — perhaps a thousand, perhaps two thousand — to and from Groom Lake. And it was EG&G, Bob Lazar claimed, that first interviewed him for a job working on flying saucers.
Another of Dreamland’s contractors was Wackenhut, which provided security services — fences and alarms and guards. When Wackenhut was handling security, the guards on the perimeter were called Wackendudes. Then, when it became clear that most of them were from another agency, they became the camou dudes, or just “the dudes.” Among those on the Ridge, the camou dudes grew to near mythical stature. Reports tended to wildly overstate their aggressiveness: Visitors were warned to avoid letting the sun glint off binocular or camera lenses, as if such a flash of light would draw M-16 fire. In fact, the fundamental condition of their jobs, as of those of most rent-a-cops, was tedium. Intruders were irritants and incidents meant paperwork. In the old days, they had ranged freely on public land, working on the principle of deterring the curious before they got near the perimeter. The camou dudes follow, lurk, and watch.
Wackenhut, which also ran the security force at the Nevada Test Site (NTS), had risen to the top of the rent-a-cop business. Like Bechtel or RAND or Mitre, it was one of the specialist organizations that grew up during the Cold War. George Wackenhut, an ambitious former FBI agent, joined with three other ex-agents in 1954 to form the private security agency. He was politically well connected and parlayed his friendships with Florida senator George Smathers, a carousing pal of JFK, and later Governor Claude Kirk, who did most of his carousing alone, into government contracts. An 1893 law, passed in resentment over the use of Pinkerton detectives to break strikes and protests, forbade the federal government to employ private detectives, but Wackenhut’s lawyers found a loophole and the company managed to grab contracts for the Titan missile silos and Cape Canaveral. Soon Wackenhut guards were working not just for NASA but guarding embassies around the world, and sometimes handling jobs for the CIA and other agencies that wanted to keep their fingerprints off illicit arms shipments.