I had met Wackenhut men at the NTS and they looked like they spent more time working out than, say, reading. Dressed in temperate-zone camou in the middle of the desert, they did not seem to be students of the natural world around them either. Now that Wackenhut had shifted to an emphasis on more promising business strategies, such as operating prisons under contract for governments eager to “privatize,” EG&G found itself in the security business too, supplying guards and even SWAT teams to NASA and DOE facilities.
But the camou dudes at Area 51 seemed to be a mixture of private guards and Air Force guards. PsychoSpy managed to discover — after one of the dudes flashed a Lincoln County deputy sheriff’s ID while hassling him — that many of them were deputized by the local sheriff’s department. Their notarized deputizations were public record, and he published many of their names.
If by some chance you should see something secret inside the perimeter, the required “oath upon inadvertent exposure” requires you to promise to remain silent, under threat of life imprisonment. Few trespassers were asked to sign it. They were generally charged in county court, fined, and released.
There were constant suggestions on how to get inside the perimeter. They were like a parody of the desperate efforts the CIA and Pentagon made in the 1940s and 1950s to get inside the “denied areas” of the Soviet Union and China, and seemed as wacky as the balloons of Project Mogul, as wild as LeMay’s fleet of RB-47s over Vladivostok. The Interceptors figured as jesters in this court of the Cold War: They constantly discussed all kinds of spy schemes, using balloons, rocket gliders, or model car “rovers” with video cameras.
On the Ridge, black-plane buffs, true believing youfers, agnostics and skeptics, radio scanners and heavy optics fans, can mingle in the democracy of curiosity. Even old test pilots would come up here now and then and look at the runway from which they had once taken off. Eventually I became convinced that the two cultures — the stealthies and the youfers — were looking for the same thing.
Standing on the Ridge, I realized that its value grew not out of how much it let you see, but how little: how great the opportunity it created to imagine, fantasize, dream. The irony was that we were spying on spies, peeking in on remote locations at people and machines whose job was to peek in on remote locations. Some of us wore the same camou as the camou dudes, listened in on the same scanners, watched the watchers with the same nightscopes. Such spying was made possible by the Pentagon: by the Internet it had created and the computers its money had developed. In effect, we were self-made spies spying on real spies. And, I would find, others were spying on the spies spying on spies.
Dreamland had been created to devise spy planes to explore Soviet or Chinese missile or nuclear test sites. But in time, Dreamland took on the qualities of the areas it was created to expose — it resembled other, even more remote locations: Kapstan Yar, Tyuratum, Lop Nor. Conceived as a place to facilitate the “penetration of denied areas,” it ended up itself behind a perimeter, a denied area.
The perimeter was only the most recent manifestation of our old friend the Frontier: the original settlement line, but also the New Frontier, the Last Frontier. It was the edge of the known, which meant it was the launching point for all sorts of explorations. It was full of the myth and mystery of any inaccessible country.
For a time, I thought of Dreamland as resembling the prints of Hiroshige, such as his Twenty-four Views of Edo, in which objects and structures in the foreground seem to get in the way of the views of the landscape. But after looking for a while at this art of “the floating world,” as the Japanese call it, one understands that the foreground is also the subject.
Such views inspired Wallace Stevens’s haiku-style poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” (“There were three blackbirds in a tree / Like a mind of three opinions.”) It seemed to me, though, that looking at Dreamland was more like Stevens’s jar in Tennessee, “taking dominion everywhere.”
“The problem,” the Minister would tell me in a phrase I could not forget, “is that the place has no edges.”
The light began to fade, the warm sun to soften as it sank. The cold wind flickered around our limbs. We built a privy in a wedge of rocks, draped with a blue tarp for privacy. Two teens spoke in a controlled tone, curious, not fanatic, but credulous, too. They talked of hearing Lazar give a lecture. They spoke of Dulce, in New Mexico, where there were said to be—“were said” was a favorite youfer locution — dozens of aliens living underground. By one account they had massacred their guards and were in control of the complex. There was talk also of the Anthill, an underground installation near Tehachapi, California, and another underground base in that state at Helendale. Someone had been near Helendale recently, and there was talk of things flying in and out of apertures in the concrete at night. “Say there are dozens of aliens underground there too,” one teen said, keeping all astonishment, all indications of belief or suspicion from his voice. “Say they’re in full control.”
As the sun went down, we built a fire, collecting stubs of Joshua trees that looked like soft, oversize pieces of coral but burned with surprising surges of flame and then a fitful glow.
The UFO types talked about Lazar. A fat girl talked about wanting to see strange things — not UFOs themselves, but weird UFO types.
As night fell, the lights came on in the base below, where personnel were probably watching television, amid the inevitable military tedium that attends even the most exotic of projects, more intently than they watched the few people, high above Dreamland, watching them.
The campsites were scattered, miscellaneous, like the social dynamic. In the middle of the night, I woke to hear the fat girl groping her way down the ridge, sleepless and grumbling.
I found myself drawn back again and again to the perimeter. One of the odd effects of visiting the Ridge was that it seemed to make visitors feel an impulse to investigate, in a vigilante way. So I came to fantasize: I saw myself as a mock version of one of those explorers charged by Congress and the Army Corps of Engineers to chart and record distant reaches of the West, men like John Wesley Powell or Clarence King. The idea of a travel account of a place you couldn’t physically visit was irresistible. But I got a surprise: The place seemed to spin me away from me the more I found out about it. And I became more fascinated with the watchers than with watching.
There is an Indian petroglyph, a spiral, found on ancient rocks in the Nevada desert, that is thought to represent language. This would be my spiraclass="underline" out and then in.
2. The Black Mailbox
The next morning we paid the obligatory visit to the Black Mailbox. It is found near milepost 29.5 of Highway 375, about twenty-five feet west of the pavement: a large round-topped mailbox painted black.
The box belonged to rancher Steve Medlin, whose cattle had the right to cross into Dreamland — and did. They also lurked by the side of the highway, looking positively eager to be mutilated by aliens, and loped across the road to endanger rental cars driven by UFO tourists. “Stealth steers,” someone called them.