Many of the Interceptors admitted that people with more vital social and personal lives did not end up hanging around the perimeter. Some saw looking for airplanes or secret saucer bases as just another way to get outdoors, camp, get some fresh air.
There were those who would fly in light planes around the perimeter, an enterprise that felt daring and exciting but offered very little new perspective or information. They visited places like Mount Charleston, where the wreckage of the C-54 that crashed in 1955 on its way to Groom Lake still lay tangled. The circle of the Interceptors widened. In August 1994, some sixty people mustered on the Ridge for what was billed as Groomstock, which included a former pilot from the Blackbird program and UFO buffs.
Once, some of the Interceptors arranged to take a tour of the Nevada Test Site with Derek as their guide. They were taken to the Command Post, with those Naugahyde chairs, the long oval tables, the maps and video screens, and given box lunches. Derek seemed in a hurry to get them into the post, although there was nothing in particular happening, no special event. Only later did it strike Bill Sweetman that they had been carefully kept inside so that they would not see something flying overhead. When he asked Derek, “What kind of pumpkins would we have turned into if we had been outside at noon?” Derek was sheepish.
After the tour, they drove all the way down to Los Angeles and crashed at the Minister’s place in the Hollywood Hills in the wee hours of the morning — only to be tossed awake a couple of hours later by the big L.A. earthquake.
The demographics of the Interceptors tended to overlap those of engineers, as the test site overlapped Dreamland. The techie connection brought with it a cynicism that resembled the mercurial charge of a semiconductor. It faded in and out, suspended possibility and speculation like a force field.
The group pursued knowledge by the accumulative and comparative methods of any good intelligence agency. For the Interceptors, simply laying out the known and marking where the unknown began — patrolling the perimeter, so to speak — was enough. Some compiled elaborate grids and tables recording information about sightings, crashes, types of aircraft known and suspected, sometimes right down to tail numbers. In this they had much in common with obsessives anywhere on the planet.
If the Interceptors parodied the CIA’s assemblage of information from bits and pieces, they also parodied its surrogate identities and the cult and camaraderie of secret military units. They took on alter egos, in the manner of blues musicians or gangsters, with names to match, mostly e-mail nicknames. The alter egos both resembled and mocked cover names of the UFO informants “Condor” or “Falcon.” They created insignia — pins and patches — as if they were a real military unit. They developed their own personal subset of the Lore.
“It’s about two and a half Tikaboos,” an Interceptor would say. “But how far is it LeBaronable?” the response would come, the rented Chrysler convertible favored by Agent X lending a mobility standard for the dirt roads in the area.
One of PsychoSpy’s sources declared that the aliens had bequeathed technology to humans through Hungarians — atomic physicists Leo Szilard and Edward Teller, aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán, weren’t they all Hungarian? And the aliens spoke a language like High Hungarian. This was a twist on an old joke from the Manhattan Project, when someone noted how many Hungarians stood among the top ranks of the project scientists — and how strange their Magyar tongue was. They must be from Mars! The joke delighted the Interceptors, and they enjoyed adding details to it. Visiting Budapest, Glenn Campbell found more than four hundred Lazars listed in the phone book.
Agent Zero had special decoder rings machined up that purported to translate Hungarian into English. They were made of titanium, just as the Blackbirds were, then anodized in a special secret fluid to lend them a silver-blue sheen that seemed to me to reflect the whole happy glitzy fascination with Area 51. The special secret fluid was Coca-Cola.
It was like putting together a mosaic, John Andrews had said, and mosaic was just what the military feared, how they justified concealing the smallest detail. Mosaic was right in another way: Mosaic was the name of the first browser program for the World Wide Web. The information Interceptors gathered found its most natural home on the Internet, in alt.conspiracy.area51, the Skunk Works digest, and, later, on elaborate Web pages.
It turned a lot of watchers into philosophers. A Washington State journalist named Terry Hansen published his musings on the Internet under the title “The Philosophy of Dreamland,” taking an epigraph from Jim Morrison (“On the perimeter, there are no stars”). “So set aside your heartfelt prejudices and incredulity for the moment,” Hansen intoned, “and come along on an epistemological adventure into the tangled and shadowy jungle of officially forbidden knowledge. Here, rational analysis can no longer be considered a reliable guide. This is a realm ruled by the high priests of the intelligence community who simply do not like us poking our noses into their business, even though we’re footing the bill for it… Any hopes for certainty must be left behind at the outer boundaries of consensus reality, for we are about to explore the enigma of Dreamland.”
As high-technology shrine or secret saucer base, Area 51 took on an existence on-line as a virtual place, a “notional” country. The buffs were rebuilding Dreamland on-line in HTML and reverse-engineering it in data.
It was Vannevar Bush, the very man reputed to have been head of the secret Majestic, or MJ-12, group, who first laid out the vision of the personal computer and its new ways of organizing information. In July 1945, in a celebrated article in the Atlantic called “As We May Think,” Bush described his vision of the Memex, a personal memory or information device. In the process, he projected something that sounds like CD-ROM and the Internet. Bush’s ideas would inspire those who created the personal computer and the Internet, people like Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, who read the Atlantic article in a straw hut in the South Pacific when he was in the military. Bush believed that the human mind operated less by classification and organization, the traditional view of thought, than by association. “With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thought, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of the trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.”
Bush had predicted, “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the Memex and there amplified.” He predicted the rise of a special profession of innovator to mark such trails and distribute them to individual Memex machines, “a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.” This anticipated the strategy of the Interceptors. They were trailblazers to documents and information of an unusual or speculative nature.
The assemblage of extremely detailed and factual studies, notes the historian Richard Hofstadter, looking back over American history in the light of McCarthyism, has long been characteristic of conspiracist groups. From these sometimes rickety, jerry-built edifices of fact, the great leap to a wider conclusion is made — a leap of suspicion that is the dark side of a leap of faith. The information the Interceptors would assemble in time lines and lists and collections was like nothing so much as a conspiracist assemblage. But not everyone was willing to climb to the top and make the leap they had prepared.