It was the saucer Lazar had nicknamed “the sport model,” and it sold out immediately, thanks perhaps to the fact that Larry King displayed the model on his desk during the October 1994 program he filmed from outside Area 51.
The Testor model made Lazar’s tale tangible. Once one had seen such detailed plastic parts, it was harder not to believe in the existence of the real craft. Andrews seemed to buy into the “trickle out” theory — all those bits and pieces, they were what the government wanted us to know, so we would be less shocked when the whole truth comes out.
As Andrews’s interest in flying saucers grew, his letters to Ben Rich and others at the Skunk Works irritated them even more. Then Rich finally sent Andrews and Goodall that letter in which he admitted, “Yes, I believe in UFOs, and so did Kelly Johnson.
“Yes,” Rich continued, “I call them UnFunded Opportunities”—in other words, Lockheed ideas the damn fool Air Force wouldn’t pay for. It was a joke, and not a kind one.
After he finished the Stealth fighter model, Andrews began to hike up Whitesides Mountain, sometimes with Lear and Goodall. Now he was looking for Aurora, or whatever it was that left the doughnut-on-a-rope contrails. After PsychoSpy moved to Rachel and began to publicize the viewpoints, the numbers of viewers grew. As in complexity theory, the first individuals evolved into a self-organizing group of watchers who would later call themselves the Dreamland Interceptors. The name was taken from the Intercepts newsletter Steve Douglass published for the secret-aircraft buffs and military monitors who eavesdropped on aircraft radios on their scanners.
Andrews, having watched black planes since the days of the U-2 and having been out on the perimeter since 1988, came to be viewed as the most veteran and venerable of the Interceptors. “It’s like a little CIA out there,” he said. “We collect bits and pieces and put them together in a mosaic.”
The Interceptors developed their own loose camaraderie and culture over the course of many visits. As their totem, the Interceptors adopted the aluminum lawn chair — that icon of suburban backyard America. It was one thing to say you had seen the base — everyone somehow seemed to feel, doing it, that they were among the first, the proud, the few — but the real badge of honor was to carry that chair up there.
USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED, read the signs on the perimeter, citing the Internal Security Act of 1950—also known notoriously as the McCarran Act, named, as is the airport in Las Vegas, for Nevada senator Pat McCarran, although it was promoted and written mostly by then Congressman Richard Nixon and Senator Karl Mundt. It struck me as appropriate to think of Richard Nixon writing the perimeter warnings.
The law’s language includes one of the clearest and most specific statements of the outlook and assumptions of the Cold Warrior:
There exists a world Communist movement which in its origins, its development, and its present practice, is a world-wide revolutionary movement whose purpose it is, by treachery, deceit, infiltration into other groups (governmental and otherwise), espionage, sabotage, terrorism, and any other means deemed necessary, to establish a Communist totalitarian dictatorship in the countries throughout the world through the medium of a world-wide Communist organization.
Before Glenn Campbell discovered Freedom Ridge in 1993, the best view of Dreamland was from Whitesides Mountain; farther away, after Freedom Ridge fell victim to the expansion of the perimeter, there was Tikaboo. Tikaboo became the agreed-upon standard for the measurement of the height of other peaks, the strenuousness of other hikes, and in planning expeditions to observe the base at Tonopah, the nuclear test site, miscellaneous mysterious electronic stations, and sites of aircraft wreckage. Visitors speculated on areas they could not reach, such as the fabled Cheshire airstrip, which was said to remain invisible until special lights were turned on. Or Base Camp, a mysterious facility north of Warm Springs and Highway 6, or Site IV, deep in between Tonopah and the restricted area around Groom. It was the home, Agent X reported, “of terrain-following radar development, covert testing of purloined Soviet, Warsaw Pact, and Chinese radars and ECM… making sure that they wouldn’t jam fuses on our nuclear weapons and disable our penetrating bombers’ electronic navigation and countermeasures. It seems to be an integral part of the Nellis Range Complex electronic warfare and evaluation capabilities along with the Tolicha Peak Electronic Combat Range.”
The mock spies—“a little CIA”—and the jesters of Dreamland watched the reliquary of the Cold War with whimsy and cynicism. They wore the same camou as the camou dudes. They reminded me of Marx’s famous statement that history happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Their production was a send-up of the Cold War; their spirit like that suggested on the old Firesign Theatre album cover bearing the revolutionary banners of Marx (Groucho) and Lennon (John).
Of course they were also just another of those self-directing American groups Tocqueville had observed, revealing a nation of joiners and near-obsessives. I recognized myself in them: We had been the kids who put together too many aircraft models and spent our time at the library looking at Aviation Week instead of reading the Hardy Boys.
Among them were journalists and buffs, private researchers and conservationists. Peter Merlin, an aviation archaeologist, found the crash sites of old planes in the desert and ferreted out details and documents. He carried a key ring made of bits of famous planes he’d found. Tom Mahood, the former civil engineer from Irvine, spent days assembling careful chronologies and descriptions of secret places like the radar cross-section facilities. He collated official brochures about Tonopah and studied old maps.
Agent X, a former Coast Guard agent and reporter for such magazines as Gung Ho and The Nose, came from his home in Juneau, Alaska, and spent days driving around the perimeters in rented convertibles turned into makeshift off-road vehicles. The cars usually came back to the rental agency in appalling shape. Once Agent X wrecked a Buick LeSabre on a cutoff from Groom Road, sliding into a ditch doing 60 miles per hour. His report made it sound like a crash of some exotic secret prototype: “The LeSabre rose in a 45-degree left roll before hanging for a moment and falling back to the desert floor.”
The Interceptors had no clubhouse or Raccoon Lodge. Their social organization could be described as ad hoc. They had no regular or official membership and only the most general of shared values and beliefs. They were against excess secrecy, but without the mystery they wouldn’t have been on the perimeter.
Some derided the youfers, some were curious and tentative, and for many the saucers stories were a little pilot flame of possibility that kept them all going — the Biggest Story in the History of Mankind. “I’m a hardware guy,” Jim Goodall said, but he was willing to speculate on the existence of extraterrestrial hardware.