In October 1940 the government turned over some five thousand square miles of public land to the military for training. Government silver certificates replaced the paycheck of the silver miners. A base was in operation at Tonopah by July 1942, and would-be fighter pilots came to the area to learn to fly BT-13 trainers and the P-39 fighter, so dangerous in its handling that both the American Army Air Corps and the RAF had rejected it.
Chuck Yeager was one of the first to train there. He lived in a tar-paper shack heated by an oil stove and recalled that the wind never seemed to stop blowing. “On paydays,” he would write, “we crowded around the blackjack tables of the Tonopah Club, drank ourselves blind on fifths of rotgut rye and bourbon, then staggered over to the local cathouse. Miss Taxine, the madam, tried to keep a fresh supply of gals so we wouldn’t get bored and become customers of Lucky Strike, a cathouse in Mina, about thirty miles down the road. But we went to Mina anyway, wrecked the place, and the sheriff ran us out of town. The next morning, a P-39 strafed Mina’s water tower.”
In the fifties, the opening of the test site to the south brought jobs for the miners and other hands. The skills of the miner, by happy coincidence, were in demand at the test site after the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1962. Testing went underground, and long tunnels had to be built to hold test equipment to record radiation and heat and blast.
Tonopah enjoyed a brief flurry of notoriety in 1957, when Howard Hughes married his longtime companion Jean Peters at the Mizpah Hotel. Hughes picked the Mizpah because he had business in the area to transact. His father had prospected here, and Hughes was betting that the silver veins were not quite tapped out. In a few months, he bought up some 710 claims, covering most of Tonopah along with some 14,200 acres of Nye and areas in other counties, for $10.5 million.
At just about the same time, the nuclear weapons designers at Sandia Labs in Albuquerque cast greedy eyes on the empty areas of the Nellis range south of the old Tonopah base and north of the test site. By 1958, they had set up the Tonopah Test and Training Range, dropping bombs to test fuses and cases and parachutes. The Interceptors would become intrigued by other sectors inside Tonopah’s ranges, such as the Tolicha Peak Electronic Warfare facility, Base Camp, to the north of Highway 6 near Warm Springs, and Site IV, where foreign radars are tested, the name an odd shadow of Bob Lazar’s mystery site, S-4, at Papoose Lake.
What drew them most, however, was the huge base built almost overnight in the middle of a test range previously dedicated mostly to radar and electronics.
One day in 1984, Col. Robert “Burner Bob” Jackson was reading The Wall Street Journal when a small advertisement caught his eye. The Chevron petroleum company had secondhand oil patch trailers to sell. Jackson bought the trailers for $10 million; he was about to move the Stealth fighter group from Groom Lake to Tonopah.
The trailers ended up on the raw site south of the old Tonopah Air Field, where mustangs roamed the runways and scorpions crept into buildings. Fences and searchlights went up along the edge of the new base, and video cameras and motion sensors were installed. Eventually the Air Force spent $300 million and fitted the place out with a gym and indoor pool.
The activity did not go unnoticed. A-7s were kept parked outside, as Soviet satellite passes overhead increased to three and four a day. The A-7s were part of a cover story; they carried old napalm canisters painted black and decorated with flashing red lights and lettering that read REACTOR COOLING FILL PORT. The idea was to spread the information that these were an “atomic anti-radar system.” Ground crews were forced to lie spread-eagle and not look at the craft as they passed. The lie must be made as hard to get at as the truth.
In the fall of 1988, the Air Force released the first, heavily doctored photograph of the fighter. It was so vague and the angle so misleading that some pilots doubled over in laughter when they saw it.
But soon the airplane buffs found out about Tonopah and the fence. By the winter of 1988, some were getting glimpses, even snapshots, that showed the strange flat shape from the bottom, the angular diamond, faceted and crimped.
Byron Augenbaugh, a schoolteacher and airplane buff from Escondido, California, drove up to Tonopah one day in the spring of 1989. At a gas station he asked where he should go to see the Stealth fighter. “Just look up,” the attendant told him, and sure enough one flew over. Augenbaugh snapped a picture. On May 1, 1989, Aviation Week ran a cover shot of the fighter so fuzzy that one of the magazine’s editors said “it looked like a French Impressionist painting.”
There was something lascivious about such images. In the first pictures of the Stealth fighter the Air Force would release, the inlets for the engines were airbrushed out, like the flaws in a Playboy centerfold model. Around the same time the Air Force chief of staff went so far as to testify that an airplane, like a beautiful woman, should reveal itself not completely but bit by bit. But artists’ impressions of the Stealth fighter and other suspected aircraft that appeared in magazines such as Popular Science had their highlights exaggerated, like the women in bomber-nose art, their shapes made fuller and more magical, and with magical light swelling and suffusing the shapes and saturating the colors.[8]
These paintings stood in contrast to the spy photos and flying saucer snapshots, blurry and grainy like the telephoto images of sunbathing celebrities in European magazines — located somewhere between imagination and reality.
The whole experience of snooping for stealth was about the means as well as the ends. It was as much about telephoto lenses, the big binoculars the stealthies called “hooters,” or the grainy green mystery images produced by night-vision equipment, as it was about any real craft.
Jim Goodall, who had the declared ambition of collecting a picture of every airplane the U.S. Air Force had ever flown, complete with tail number — more than a hundred thousand pictures — claimed an almost sexual rush when he first saw the Stealth fighter in the winter of 1988. For a traveling salesman of computer equipment, he had a surprisingly sensual side, and was a sharp dancer in the Holiday Inn discos he visited on the road. Goodall was often joined on the fence line at Tonopah by John Andrews, the veteran plastic model designer for the Testor corporation. In 1986 Testor had released Andrews’s model of the Stealth fighter, called the “F-19” and based on his glimpses as well as reports from the other watchers. It was like putting together a police composite sketch of a wanted man, he said.
The model set off a small storm in Washington. How could a model company know what America’s most closely guarded secret looked like, when our lawmakers themselves did not know? Of course, everyone in and around the black world knew that the last person to be briefed on a project of such high security was a congressman. You might as well just publish the specs in the Congressional Register. Angered and embarrassed, congressmen held hearings to find out how the shape of the plane had leaked. By one account, the Air Force had to bring a model of the real fighter to Capitol Hill in a locked box, handcuffed to a guard, to illustrate to them that Andrews’s model was wrong.
But the Air Force and the Skunk Works could only say it was wrong, and not show it, unless they broke down the very secrecy designed to keep people like Andrews out.
I drove east out of town toward the base. The road was lined with corrals and horse stables indistinguishable from houses, and old mines and piles of tailings. I passed a truck with a bumper sticker that advised IF IT DOESN’T GROW, IT HAS TO BE MINED.
8
This quality of pornographic titillation extended to images of alien spacecraft and alien bodies as well. In the September 1996 issue of