Campbell rightly understood that the hardest thing for the military to deal with was derision. His best line was his response to the signs on the perimeter and the apparatus of secrecy they stood for: “Use of deadly farce authorized.”
Glenn Campbell and Jim Goodall designed their own version of a uniform patch for the workers at Groom. It portrayed an Aurora-like craft sweeping up from a dry lake with mountains behind it, and the words “Dreamland Groom Lake Test Site.” Soon we heard the patch was for sale at a store in the Pentagon mall. Glenn did not hesitate to print it up on T-shirts and caps and sell it through his catalog and in his “Research Center.” Then it was reproduced in several magazines as if it were official, as if it were actually worn by the camou dudes and others inside the base.
A year or so later I was in Nevada again. I phoned Glenn from Las Vegas. “Well,” he said, “I’ll have to be in the Research Center all day.” This tone of pressing business was new.
The Research Center was Glenn’s trailer, at the south end of Rachel, and I knew it well. “I’ve never seen the Research Center,” I said, trying to keep the archness out of my voice.
When I pulled up to the little trailer, I noticed junk outside — a cow skull, with bits of skin and hair still clinging to it, and some old aircraft parts. Inside on the ceiling was a large map of Dreamland and surrounding airspace, and a big new Macintosh sat on a table. On the wall was a quotation from anthropologist Margaret Mead about how a few people with conviction can change the world. On the floor were strewn old socks.
Secret aircraft interested Campbell barely at all. He had once said that if the legendary Aurora landed in front of him, taxied up, and ran over his foot, he would pay it no attention.
He handed me an article called “Effects of UFOs upon Human Beings.” It dealt with odd electrical effects — radio static, flashing lights — such as those seen in the pickup truck scene in Close Encounters. I noticed that the author was named “McCampbell,” and the similarity made me wonder if this guy was not some kind of doppelgänger of Glenn’s, what he wished he could be — if only he could believe. It was a measured, mostly scientific report on radio interference, sunburn effects, electrical shorts, and other phenomena reported by those who had encountered UFOs.
There were those who believed Campbell was a closet youfer, but he became increasingly skeptical of Lazar. Gene Huff, Lazar’s pal, took to calling Campbell “Goober” on-line. “He tends to alienate people,” said Huff. “He’s a strange bird, a weird guy. He told me he moved out here because of the Bob Lazar story, and now he attacks Bob. I call his operation the UFO division of the Mickey Mouse Club. It may be fine for the shitkickers and dickheads in Rachel, but not for the rest of the world.”
Campbell had alienated Huff by publishing transcripts of Lazar’s statements at the Ultimate UFO Conference in Rachel, when Huff believed that he was the only one with the right to do so. Huff took a kind of pride in defending Lazar. He made Campbell a particular target, hinting darkly of immoral, even criminal behavior in his background. The word among the Interceptors was that each had something on the other. Campbell had negative information on Lazar’s credibility; Huff had info on Campbell. It was a parody of MAD, mutual assured destruction, so neither could use the stories, even if they were true. “Well,” Steve Douglass remarked wryly when he heard of these supposed skeletons, “I guess we all have our little Groom Lakes.”
Campbell made life difficult for the Air Force by challenging its takeover of additional land, including the Freedom Ridge overlooks. But his whole media act as “searcher for the nature of truth” was as pretentious as his dressing in camou gear and eating MREs.
On one trip to Tonopah, PsychoSpy hurled himself up against the chain-link fence and the guard quickly dropped to a crouch and focused his M-16. Usually you could josh with the guards, but all of sudden the casualness was gone. Everyone in the party was shocked.
The guard had grown increasingly irritated. On their radios, the dudes referred to Campbell as “our friend” or “the editor.” Inevitably, he managed to get himself arrested. Accompanying yet another reporter and camera crew, he led the dudes on a chase that ended with the group pinned down by a sandblasting chopper, then cut off by one of the dude mobiles. When they asked for the film, PsychoSpy locked the doors of his Toyota. They finally forced him out and confiscated his film.
He went to court, serving as his own attorney in a thirty-eight-dollar suit he bought at a Mormon thrift shop in Las Vegas. He argued that by not returning his film the dudes were in effect concealing evidence of a crime: They had flown the helicopter that sandblasted him below the five-hundred-foot FAA-mandated minimum altitude.
It was all to no avail, as he knew it would be, and he was fined. His community service included working on a history of Rachel and helping out at the senior center.
After Freedom Ridge was closed off in the spring of 1995, and perhaps finding his welcome in Rachel wearing thin, PsychoSpy rented an apartment in a complex in Las Vegas, near the airport. From his front window he could see the Janet flights taking off and landing on their way to and from Groom. He called this his “Las Vegas Research Center.” It was a characteristically defiant gesture.
If he sometimes seemed smug, feeding off his appearances in the media even as he spoke disdainfully of its operations, he was better than anyone at cutting to key points about the base. Wrapping himself in his cloak of citizen advocate, he argued that the importance of the Lazar story was not the existence or nonexistence of UFOs in government hands. What mattered was that there could be. Policies of secrecy had made it possible, and those policies were in defiance of all-American moral law and tradition.
PsychoSpy wrote that he — except he used the editorial or royal “we”—approached aliens-at-the-test-site stories “as folklore.” “Rather than assuming a story is false until proven true,” he stated in The Desert Rat, “we proceed as though it were true, collecting information about it until we reach an insurmountable roadblock or inconsistency.” No lie, he was confident, could “reproduce all the rich interconnections of reality.
“As long as a story remains interesting in itself, like a well-constructed novel, we are willing to set aside the issue of truth and go along for the ride,” he added, sounding somewhat like Jung himself.
The real problem was that the military and the government — or whatever conspiracy you wanted to postulate — had been able to establish enough secrecy to make the possibility of flying saucers at Area 51 vital for thousands of citizens. At Groom Lake, airplanes had been chopped up, burned, and buried; entire programs were erased from the record. They had kept the first spy satellite secret for more than thirty years and the National Reconnaissance Office, the organization that operated it, unacknowledged and virtually unknown for even longer. They had managed to hide the NRO’s “stealth building”—only feet from the strip mall and spec office parks around Dulles Airport — from Congress itself. They had kept secret for years the post-nuclear-war presidential redoubt in the basement of the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia. Excessive secrecy left the way open for — fairly demanded — all kinds of conspiratorial speculations. If nothing was seen, much would be dreamed.
Lurking on the Internet, as on a high-elevation viewpoint, I saw Dreamland taking on a new, shadowy presence in cyberspace. Sometimes active pilots would appear. There were B-1B crews, chattering and bragging. A few days later they suddenly disappeared. I had the very firm impression that a higher-up had spotted the postings. The B-1 is known to airmen as “the Bone” and its crews, by extension, as “Bonemen,” if not “Boners,” men of camaraderie and enthusiasm who write poetry “on beer drinking, cannibalism, and such.” Perhaps the colonel was not pleased to read about a near-supersonic flight with live ordnance, as in a message headed “Lots o’ Iron”: “Yesterday, we were 500AGL, 998 Mach, very very near civilized establishments en route to the ft Sill IP with 84; live eggs on board — that, my friends, is the sound of freedom!”