In just a few years, the Men in Black story took on detail and showed all the mutability of a traditional folktale. The Tacoma Buick was upgraded in many versions to a black Cadillac. These Men in Black often dressed too warmly; they walked and talked mechanically; they had vaguely Asian features. They could have been aliens themselves, even robots. To folklorist Peter M. Rojcewicz, they suggested the ominous dark men or evil tricksters found in many folk traditions.
The story took a new twist in 1980 when Lowell Cunningham, hearing of the legend in casual conversation, was inspired to create a humorous comic-book version of the tale. It underwent a further twist when the comic book became the basis for a screenplay and, in 1997, a hit film, Men in Black.
Neither Cunningham nor Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed the film, had heard of Crisman and Dahl or Gray Barker or any of the origins of the MiB myth. Knowing it only as an urban legend, they felt free to extemporize on it and the film provided a darkly comic rendition of what had begun as sinister. The film was another play on the alien immigrant/alien life-form pun, and the cinematic Men in Black were urbanized agents belonging to a sort of intergalactic Immigration and Naturalization Service. They provided the great service of keeping us safe and happy in our ignorance of the alien presence.[6]
The camou dudes at Area 51 were in some sense imaginative relatives of the Men in Black. Their danger was overestimated; they took on an almost folkloric quality of menace. Sometimes they inhabited the dreams of watchers, like modern-day Greek Furies. So when Gene Huff talked about his feelings of fear and guilt after visiting the perimeter with Lazar, he talked about “the Dream Police”—police in his mind. The camou dudes, like the mysteries of Area 51 itself, came at the end of a long tradition — a legacy of fear. They were shadows of very old figures of menace, just as the mysteries of Area 51 itself touched almost primal fears of the unknown.
10. Paradise Ranch
For Curtis LeMay, 1954 was the year of “maximum danger,” the year he believed the Soviets would have more than enough bombs and bombers to hit us and we wouldn’t yet have enough of the silver bombers he thought the United States needed to strike back. For the country at large, it was a year of fear — the depth of Cold War paranoia, the high-water mark of McCarthyism. The greatest fear was of surprise attack, an atomic Pearl Harbor. President Eisenhower feared a surprise attack too, a lack of intelligence like the one that had nearly cost him his reputation at the Battle of the Bulge. If LeMay had seemed eager to start World War III, there were others in 1954 who began creating an airplane that could prevent it.
Out of a sense of near national emergency — a desperate desire to see what was going on inside the Soviet Union — the U-2 spy plane was developed. In July 1954, Ike had created the Killian Committee, chaired by MIT president James Killian, and including leading lights of the scientific community as well as military figures, to decide what to do about the danger of atomic surprise attack. Relying heavily on work by the RAND corporation, its report came in the autumn. One of its key recommendations was the development of some sort of aerial reconnaissance to establish the state of Soviet weaponry.
Major Seaberg’s “Bald Eagle” proposal for a high-flying spy plane was brought out of the files; aviation contractors were quietly asked for ideas. Among their proposals was one for a Mach 4 plane launched from the back of a fast B-58 bomber. Another called for a ramjet aircraft to be carried to high altitude by a huge balloon, then released. Kelly Johnson of the Lockheed Skunk Works proposed putting long wings on the fuselage of his F-104 Starfighter — and, he promised, he could do it quickly.
To Edwin Land of Polaroid, a key member of the Killian group, the Skunk Works proposal, called the CL-282, seemed the most practical and potentially the fastest way to put cameras over the Soviet Union. On November 5, 1954, Land wrote a memo to CIA director Allen Dulles called “A Unique Opportunity for Comprehensive Intelligence,” pushing the Lockheed idea.
No proposal or program that we have seen in intelligence planning can so quickly bring so much vital information at so little risk and at so little cost.
We have been forced to imagine what [the Soviet] program is, and it could well be argued that peace is always in danger when one great power is essentially ignorant of the major economic, military, and political activities… of another great power… We cannot fulfill our responsibility for maintaining the peace if we are left in ignorance of Russian activities.
He made another key point: Such a program was also vital in order to avoid “over-estimation” of the enemy — as dangerous as its opposite.
Land was persuasive and obtained Eisenhower’s approval. By December 1954, Kelly Johnson had in his hand a contract to produce twenty of the planes for $22 million — all within nine months. The CIA would foot the bill from discretionary — and very much unaccounted for — funds. And it, not the Air Force, would take charge of the project, code-named Aquatone.
Soon a strange figure began to be seen in the shops and offices of the Skunk Works. A tall, stooped man, he inevitably reminded observers of a stork. No one introduced this odd Easterner — anyone at Lockheed could tell that he was from back East, so out of place was he inside the yellow hangars in Burbank — except occasionally he was referred to simply as “Mr. B.” He would look even more out of place later on the caliche runway at the base at Groom Lake.
Mr. B. was Richard Bissell, a former Yale economics professor who now headed up Aquatone.
Bissell had grown up in comparative privilege in Hartford, Connecticut, where his family owned Mark Twain’s old house. “It was a world unto itself,” he would recall, full of odd rooms, secret closets, and private balconies — a happy psychic conditioning, perhaps, for the hidden chambers of the intelligence establishment he was to join. As a child he once tossed his teddy bear off the fantail of the Queen Mary and ordered his nanny to retrieve it. As a teenager, he looked out on the Colosseum and the ruins of the Forum and meditated on the nature of empire.
After Groton and Yale, where he turned down admission to Skull and Bones and became an America Firster, dedicated to keeping the country out of the mounting European conflict, he went on to graduate school. He turned to government just in time to become a key figure in one of the unsung but vital logistics battles of World War II. While U-boats roamed in wolfpacks preying on Allied shipping, and the codebreakers back in England labored to defeat them without tipping their hands, Bissell almost single-handedly ran the Allied merchant shipping program. Using a complex system of file cards, he figured out how to turn ships around fast, and what to fill their limited holds with — bombs or oil or coal — and how to get fruit and tea to London. After the war, he drafted the initial proposal for the Marshall Plan.
In Washington after the war, Bissell’s imperial thoughts found congenial territory. Dean Acheson has compared the face-off between the United States and the Soviet Union to that between Rome and Carthage. Bissell quickly became part of the influential Georgetown cocktail party set, gathering over martinis to discuss affairs of state with the Rostows and the Alsops, the Grahams — Kate and Phil of The Washington Post—and the Dulleses — John Foster, Ike’s secretary of state, Eleanor, a State Department expert in Asian affairs, and Allen, the head of the CIA.
6
For other variations on the Men in Black theme, see Scott Spencer’s novel (Knopf, 1995) of the same name, about a literary novelist whose work-for-hire book on UFOs becomes a runaway bestseller, and