Bob Lazar used this mailbox as a convenient landmark to direct viewers to watch for the appearance of the craft he said flew from Dreamland. But from a mere landmark, the Black Mailbox quickly became an icon as hundreds of watchers flocked to the area hoping to catch a glimpse of saucers rising above the mountains from the Groom Lake base.
Could any symbol be handier than a mailbox? This large, classic curved-steel container, fastened with a small silver-colored padlock and puckered by the passage of .22 caliber projectiles, was a key trope of the information age, a repository for missives — some official, some personal, some commercial, the believable and the exaggerated. It was the perfect symbol of Dreamland. Of the whole black world, the black budget! It suggested blackmail and Men in Black and black helicopters.
What you could see from the Black Mailbox “was better than having sex for the first time,” Gene Huff would say. “Not for the second time, but the first.”
Huff recalled that when Bob Lazar took him out there the light from the mysterious object over the Jumbled Hills was so sudden and bright they instinctively moved behind the open trunk of the car, to shield themselves. The next Wednesday night, they returned and the disc staged an even more breathtaking performance, blinking and with each blink seeming to jump toward them.
And this was the remarkable thing, the linchpin of Lazar’s credibility: He could tell when the saucers would come. After the reports began to appear, more and more people made the pilgrimage to the Black Mailbox to enjoy the same thrill.
They saw everything from red darters to orange orbs and green glowing discs that hovered, turned suddenly, and shot away at incredible speed. They thrilled to “objects that glow with an amber light and flitted like fireflies,” to dots that “performed zigzag movement incomprehensible in terms of conventional aerodynamics.” They talked of HPACs—“human-piloted alien craft”—captured saucers, flown by humans.
Their accounts appeared on the Internet, full of a sense of menace — more in anticipation of the camou dudes than from their actual behavior. They all had the same sense of being among the first ever to see. And as a rule the farther they had traveled to get there, the more they saw.
Was it just because they had come all the way from Norway that one group worked itself into a lather of twenty or thirty sightings in one night, none of which was recorded on their videotapes? The group posted on the Internet a verbose account of their visit to the Mailbox. The account tells of dozens of saucers and a sky filled with “lazars.” I nearly jumped when I noticed this usage — was this a spell checker error or simply imperfect English? The “lazars” crisscrossed and danced across the sky in all colors — laser beams. They thought they saw fake clouds, generated by machinery, which hid the saucers from view, lenticular clouds produced by weather manipulation technology.[1]
… the first sightings were lights bouncing… We watched flickers, flashes, and sparks — also tremendous rapid “streaks” of light from base to cloud…. Now for the following time until 2:30 A.M. we were having continual sightings. Up to six ships at a time, appeared… We grew accustomed to the ships in such a short minimal period of time. After an hour and a half, we were “used” to them… There was no “threat” no nothing, just playful, curious encounters — goes to show HOW fast we humans can grow accustomed to things….
I turn and there’s a beautiful “green” ship hovering… Then another one came in to the right, an orange one… [then] a green object, more Pleiadian shaped than the others we had seen… At the bottom of it, two bright lights in motion, but connected to the whole ship, all in orange colors… It vibrated and was as if it were alive… there was definitely a feeling of life & intelligence… for several minutes we were paralyzed in joy and disbelief… This particular sighting was the longest one of them all, and gave us real time to “tune in” to it, and become “acquainted” with its presence… We were feeling so relaxed about it all, didn’t seem at all strange that we were there with UFO’s, and the next thing we thought was like: “… so, now what?”
The visiting youfers felt this was their landscape. To Sean David Morton, self-proclaimed “UFO authority” and erstwhile astrologer, predictor of earthquakes, and channeler from Hermosa Beach, California, it was the only place in the world where you could see flying saucers on a regular schedule and therefore the only place to which he could lead people for good money. Another buff, Gary Schultz, proclaimed himself “the world’s authority on Area 51.” He established a business guiding tourists on what he called “Secret Saucer Base Expeditions” and had the temerity to rename one of the mountains nearby after his girlfriend Pearl. No one else called Whitesides “Pearl’s Peak.”
Yet the citizens of Rachel, Nevada, in Lincoln County rarely saw anything at all out of the ordinary. Nor did I ever see anything that appeared not to be a flare or a helicopter or other distinct craft. Of course the ordinary included all the craft flying from Nellis, dozens of planes from the base’s Red Flag, Green Flag, and other exercises roaring over the area east of the forbidden Box.
The Interceptors wondered, Wasn’t it odd that the schedule of saucer sightings corresponded so closely to the schedule of flights from McCarran to Groom Lake? Didn’t “Old Faithful,” the UFO that appeared each Thursday morning so predictably for Morton’s customers, coincide with the schedule of the early Janet Airline flight from Las Vegas? Didn’t a lot of the green lights suggest magnesium flares dropped by fighters to decoy heat-seeking missiles or illuminate ground targets?
For the black-plane buffs, the sightings tended to be more widely dispersed, from as far away as Beale Air Force Base and Mojave in California. Supersonic planes, after all, could take the width of a good-size western state just to make a turn. The craft seen near Edwards Air Force Base in California would soon be in Nevada. Some saw hovering wings in Nevada near Pahrump, others around Goldfield. And Agent X spotted a bat-winged airplane over the town of Alamo, just up the road from Rachel. Dreamland was simply the end of a corridor that ran back to California’s aerospace center in the Antelope Valley, to Edwards and Palmdale’s factories, to which the contractors had moved from their original urban factories in Long Beach, Culver City, Burbank, and Santa Monica.
For a time, Aviation Week would report in great detail such sightings under headlines like POSSIBLE BLACK AIRCRAFT SEEN FLYING IN FORMATION WITH F-117S, KC 135S, and the details would make hearts beat faster. Some of the hearts were in the medal-encrusted chests of Air Force generals, who expressed displeasure to the editors. In any case, when correspondent Bill Scott was shifted from southern California to the magazine’s Washington bureau, such articles became fewer and notably less speculative.
Some sources for the stories described distinctive contrails — the “doughnuts on a rope” said to be characteristic of the new high-tech “pulse detonation engine,” which was a real enough technology but of unclear technical maturity.
There were sounds as well as sights: the “Aurora roar” or the “pulser sound”; “a sound like the sky ripping”; “a very, very low rumble, like air rushing through a big tube.”
The black-plane watchers and the youfers often stood side by side, looking at the same sky, seeing different things yet uttering a common cry: “Did you see that?”
1
Clouds in the desert take on a fascinating variety of shapes. But especially remarked on in Nevada are the lenticular or lens-shaped clouds — clouds that with the scalelessness lent by desert distance can seem very much like flying saucers. Many servicemen in the area, especially those from the East, are struck by them; they send photos back to their relatives and to small-town newspapers. The images are sometimes printed as saucer photos.
Fascination with lenticular clouds has taken other twists. Youfers looking at paintings and engravings have seen what most people would consider clouds as stylized flying saucers. I picked up a volume of UFO lore that contained a sketch of part of Piero della Francesca’s famous fresco series in Arezzo. The lenticular clouds pictured in the book seemed to look like flying saucers. But I looked up an image of the same part of the fresco in another volume and found the clouds quite cloudlike in the original.