The Interceptors knew something was happening when they showed up in the movies. The 1996 film Broken Arrow contained a reference to “the guys in lawn chairs just watching for something to take off.” In the film, a bomber and a nuke go astray, and the first official instinct is to cover it all up, keep it secret. But, a young aide warns, “Don’t forget the guys in lawn chairs” watching all the bases, who will notice a bomber leave and not return. Area 51 had crept into the mainstream of popular culture with a speed that surprised even the hardiest Interceptors.
The de facto leader of the Interceptors’ Nevada branch, Glenn Campbell, aka PsychoSpy, aka the Desert Rat, aka “not the singer,” was a controversial figure in the town of Rachel. He irked some locals by failing to commit clearly on the UFO question, and some Interceptors were dismayed by his limited interest in secret aircraft. The saucers were taken as certainty by the Travises and Chuck Clark. It was popular among the Interceptors to see Clark as Campbell’s opposite, and to view PsychoSpy’s Research Center and the Inn where the Travises and Clark held forth as two poles, one honest and inquiring, the other opportunistic and mercenary. But it was not so simple: They seemed to be distorted reflections of each other rather than opposites. Campbell’s patch and guide were also commercial enterprises, and Clark’s efforts were certainly philosophical. Campbell needed the black aircraft that bored him; Clark and the Travises, playing out their interview roles over and over, had come to need the saucers. One sometime resident compared them to the two drug connections rumored to be found at either end of town, competing with each other in the sale of crystal meth, a popular antidote to desert ennui.
But if he figured as the Hamlet of the hamlet of Rachel, Campbell was also the village explainer, laying out the mythologies, systematizing the lore. Glenn Campbell was the closest thing in Rachel to Joseph Campbell. In his role as PsychoSpy, he was drawn to the tales as parables.
In one tale, he was lying in the backseat of his car parked along Mailbox Road when he first saw them: strange spaceships, dotted with lights, hovering. They flew right over the car. It was only later, after thinking about the vivid memories he had had, that he realized he had been lying in a position from which he could not have seen ships overhead. He used the story as an example of how easy it was to delude yourself into thinking you had seen something you had not, how tricky the business of seeing things in the sky near the Black Mailbox was.
Campbell dressed in camou outfits bought at Hahn’s Surplus in Las Vegas and talked a lot about his selection of MREs—“meals ready to eat,” latter-day K-rations. Sometimes he suggested a grown-up version of the kid in your neighborhood who wanted to play soldiers all the time.
He said that he was not a UFO buff or Stealth fan but a philosopher and inquirer into the nature of truth. His business card read, “Area 51 Research Center. UFOs — Gov’t Secrets — Philosophy — Psychology etc.” He would make himself the chief researcher into Area 51, an advocate against secrecy, an extremely useful talking head for television crews, and a spy. “I am spying,” he would say, “on behalf of the American people.”
He had quickly run afoul of Joe and Pat Travis and been exiled to a trailer at the other end of town. The story going around was that Joe, drunk one night, had burst into the trailer and put a gun to Glenn’s head. Campbell’s story was that Joe had come in “in a drunken rage” and accused him of killing the Inn’s business.
Before I came to Nevada, Steve Douglass had told me about PsychoSpy. I phoned and Campbell sent me a copy of his Area 51 Viewer’s Guide. It compared well with the better travel guides to Europe. The very idea that someone had created a travel guide to a place that did not officially exist was exquisitely appealing to all of us fascinated by Dreamland. In his write-up of the Guide for the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy and Government Bulletin, Steve Aftergood praised “its deliberate epistemological murkiness.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Campbell scrawled on the cover of the copy he sent me. Did I seem naïve? Had he marked me as a skeptic? It was the first sign of his tendency — useful for dealing with the press — to chose his words carefully to match his audience.
I first met him at the trailhead to Freedom Ridge. He was standing beside his battered subcompact car, still with Massachusetts plates and covered with dozens of little stickers from places he had visited. We gave each other a look. I think his was suspicious. I know mine was. I wanted to like him, but from that first moment at the trailhead I had found it difficult to warm to him. The Minister, another Interceptor, suggested that he was trying to overcome his basic shyness in that diffident way shy people often assume. He often had the air of a hired guide, the park ranger of Dreamland, but in time I came to think of him as a jester and as, in that grand American locution, a gadfly. A philosopher, a naturalist of the unnatural, he sometimes suggested a parodic Thoreau, with Groom Dry Lake as his Walden Pond.
If you were simplifying the story of Dreamland for a TV movie, and needed to combine all the Interceptors into one character, Campbell might be that character. He gave good sound bites to the visiting syndicated TV shows, varying his tone, patiently doing retakes. In PsychoSpy, producers could imagine all the Interceptors’ modes and dreams wrapped up in this one guy.
Campbell had established what he called “the Whitesides Defense Council,” to fight the military’s takeover of the viewpoints there and on Freedom Ridge, and then “the Secrecy Oversight Council.” He skillfully tapped into the skepticism toward the federal government, one of the few common bonds among Nevadans, and established a middle ground between political right and left, and between the youfers and stealthies who wanted to break down the walls of what they deemed unnecessary government secrecy. He named the ridge he had discovered Freedom Ridge, because who could be against freedom?
Nevadans have long resented federal ownership of the vast majority of their lands, even though the feds pump billions of dollars into the state economy through the military, the DOE, and other agencies. What Mark Twain wrote in Roughing It about nineteenth-century Nevadans pretty much holds true today. When they finally achieved statehood, Twain said, “The people were glad to have a legitimately constituted government, but did not particularly enjoy having strangers from distant states put in authority over them — a sentiment that was natural enough.”
Soon Campbell began distributing a newsletter called The Desert Rat by mail and on the Net. He reported on hearings, arrests of perimeter crossers, and Area 51 rumor and lore. He told of strange characters that appeared in Rachel, like Ambassador Merlyn Merlin II from the planet Draconis, who said he was a “being of Light” (although, PsychoSpy editorialized, “we touched him and found him to be quite solid”). Merlin was on a mission to promote the coming “Golden Age,” when the aliens would be integrated into our society and we humans would evolve into a higher form. Campbell came up with an odd source from within the test site: Jarod, who claimed to have worked on “flight simulators” for the alien craft hidden at S-4.
Campbell kept showing up at hearings and working the media, irritating the hell out of the military and the Lincoln County sheriff’s department. And he fought the BLM’s efforts to seize more land by demanding that the Air Force explain why it needed the land, what it was doing in Dreamland. He bent a classic bureaucratic catch-22 back on itself: The government needed the land to keep secret what it was doing on the base, but because what it was doing was secret it could not explain why it needed the land.