Was that, I wondered, the case with a story like the one headlined, TOP SECRET: U.S. HOLDING NAZI WAR CRIMINALS IN SECRET AREA 51 IN NEVADA — AS SLAVE SCIENTISTS TO BUILD WEAPONS! I went away shaking my head. I had never thought to suspect that the government might control the Weekly World News.
The first time they climbed Whitesides Mountain to survey Area 51, Jim Goodall thought Lear would never make it because he has flat feet. But Lear carried the sixty-pound pack all the way, and Goodall was the one who had the hard time.
Goodall may have been the most fervent of the Interceptors. As I had, he had grown up in the shadow of the SAC B-36.
One evening in the summer of 1951, when he was five years old, Goodall felt his father shaking him awake. There’s something you’ve got to see, his father told him. Young Jim went outside and heard the rumble of two dozen B-36s and saw their shadows—“aluminum overcast.” He was fascinated. When the family moved to the San Francisco area, he found his way to airplanes again. He once sat in the prototype XF-104 Starfighter in a wind tunnel in Sunnyvale and managed to close the canopy. Even as a kid he knew enough to be careful of what lever he pulled; he knew there was such a thing as an ejection seat. Another characteristic of his personality was already forming: He talked his way out of trouble.
He joined the Air Force in March 1962, and in February 1964 he was at Edwards working on a communications system. President Johnson had just made the existence of the Blackbird public, and Goodall saw his first, a YF-12. He still remembers the date — February 29, 1964. “I was about to get on the Northrop shuttle to Hawthorne when I heard this incredible roar and ran down to the flight-line area and looked to the south.”
There Goodall saw a black airplane that he at first thought was the famous X-15 rocket plane, but from the scale of the people standing beside it he realized it was a larger craft. The little prop shuttle took off and it flew right over the taxiing YF-12. The moment he saw the Blackbird framed in the window beneath him, he realizes now, he imprinted on it like some infant animal. He was locked in to the fascination of his life. “I could not believe my eyes,” he remembered later. “At that point I became obsessed.”
After he got out of the Air Force, he would split time between selling computer hardware on the road and serving in the Air National Guard in Minnesota. As unit historian, he managed to persuade the Air Force to provide him with an old Blackbird for the group’s museum. It was an A-12, an agency plane, and Goodall made it the most meticulously restored and maintained Blackbird in the world. In time, Goodall was admitted to the Roadrunner’s Club, whose members had worked on the U-2 or the Blackbirds between 1955 and 1968 at the Ranch.
He has calculated that he’s spent some eighty days on the perimeter — twice the time Jesus spent in the desert — on Whitesides and Freedom Ridge, then by the fence line at Tonopah, looking for the Stealth fighter, and later at Brainwash Butte. He would take one of the first clear pictures of the F-117.
By the time he went up to Whitesides to look down on Dreamland for the first time with John Lear in the fall of 1988, his obsession had expanded. At some point during the revelation of the Lazar story, and talking to those who had worked at the base, Goodall crossed the Ridge — or began to straddle it. He came to believe in the presence of alien craft, as did John Andrews, his frequent companion on the trips. “There are things out there that would make George Lucas green with envy,” he had been told, and he believed.
The key moment in his conversion was a letter Ben Rich had written to him, in which Rich said that both he and Kelly Johnson believed in UFOs. (But in the account I had, this was a tease.) Goodall talked often with Rich, who respected him as a true buff, someone who saw that what the Skunk Works had done was important history. Rich even appreciated the efforts of Goodall and the others to get the story out; as he grew older, he saw that the whole system of secrecy had grown more and more onerous. Rich now felt that it was out of hand, and he once compared the Interceptors to Ross Perot, shrilly crying for a change in a system gone wrong.
Goodall had come to believe in the saucers. Something, he wasn’t sure what, had happened at Roswell. He could believe most of Lazar’s story. Perhaps Lear — as always, a central figure, the key link — had influenced him, but what for most of the Interceptors was just an intriguing possibility became a certainty for Goodall.
It did not reduce his interest in black craft. He was still into every detail of every possible project. He became the butt of gentle jokes about his constant obsession with “something new at Tonopah.” He would hide under camou net for days and come back reporting that security was tighter than during the Stealth deployment and that some new craft must be flying. But he was not able to pin down what craft.
John Andrews was constantly enraging the people at the Skunk Works. The very mention of his name, and his constant letters of inquiry, sent Ben Rich fairly raving. Kelly Johnson had been outraged when he learned in the early eighties that Andrews had been allowed to photograph and measure the D-21 Blackbird drones in storage at the boneyard at Davis-Monthan — the same strange shape I was told I did not see.
In 1959 he knew all about the U-2 and contacted Lockheed, but he honored the company’s request not to produce a model. Only in 1962 was a miniature U-2 released by Hawk Models in Chicago.
When Andrews was pursuing the Stealth fighter, an AFOSI officer flew out from Washington and told him, “Just be patient.” Andrews expects AFOSI to keep an eye on him; it’s their job. But today, Andrews feels, “things have changed. Once it was man to man. Now they are hiding behind regulations.”
When his model of the Stealth fighter, billed as the “F-19,” appeared in 1986, it became the best-selling plastic aircraft model of all time, with a million sold, and it is now highly sought by collectors. Although Andrews estimates its dimensions were accurate to about 2 percent of the real thing, and 75 percent accurate in shape, in fact it turned out to more closely resemble the speculative Russian Stealth fighter, the experimental MiG Ferret. But some of the buffs, who had long imagined the craft, would later say it looked more like the idea of Stealth than the real one.
Andrews was unapologetic. “The model helped keep the security of the airplane, because everybody was looking at it, saying, That’s what it looks like.”
“But,” I interposed, “what if you had been more accurate?”
He had no answer.
Andrews next turned out his model of the long-rumored “Aurora” spy plane, with its pulser engine. This came directly from his visits to the perimeter. “I’ve slept on the top of Whitesides,” he said, “and heard the pulser in December 1992. You cannot mistake it. It has a very low frequency; there’s nothing like it.”
To some of the Interceptors, though, the appearance of the Testor company’s Lazar saucer showed that Andrews had crossed the line.
“I’m quite comfortable with Lazar,” Andrews has said, and he seems to believe most of Lazar’s story. He’d consulted with Lazar and Jon Farhat, a computer graphic designer who was working on the long-gestating film about Lazar, in the development of the model.
Andrews’s model of the Lazar saucer was skillfully packaged so that no one could tell just how seriously it was intended. “Area S4 UFO Revealed!” ran the copy on the box. “A scale model kit of the alien craft allegedly hidden in Nevada by the U.S. Government as described by eyewitness and former government physicist, Bob Lazar.” Paint and cement not included. Skill Level Two. Sixteen-page full-color book included. “Type of vehicle: Anti-matter reaction, gravity amplification, interstellar craft. Made of metallic substance of unknown nature, containing an antimatter reactor to bend space-time, fueled by element 115.” Rendered in 1/48 scale, it was made up of twenty-three plastic pieces, including a transparent top to offer a view of the antimatter reactor. Testor also carefully stated on the box that “we can neither confirm nor deny” the existence of the craft on which the model is based.