Soon enough, there were not only newsgroups about Dreamland, like alt.conspiracy.area51, but websites devoted to it. Glenn Campbell had previously learned that some mail to Area 51 was directed to “Pittman Station, Henderson.” Henderson is a town just east of Las Vegas, the site of a defunct post office that once received mail for the base. One buff plugged “Pittman Station” into the Alta Vista web searcher. It came back with a 1990 NASA press release listing astronaut candidates. Pittman Station was listed as the site of employment of a Capt. Carl E. Walz. Another buff then did a search for “Walz” and came up with a detailed NASA biography. You could read that Walz’s parents lived in South Euclid, Ohio, and that he had graduated from Charles T. Brush High School in Lyndhurst, Ohio. You could also find that “in July 1987 he was transferred to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he served as a Flight Test Program Manager at Detachment 3, Air Force Flight Test Center.” The Air Force Flight Test Center is located at Edwards Air Force Base, apparently with a detached unit at Groom Lake, with a Pittman Station mail drop: It appeared that Walz had worked in Dreamland. Had he flown Aurora? Been a test pilot for some other project? None of that was answered.
Glenn drew it all together. Having previously established that AFFTC “has a presence at Groom… now we know that it is Detachment 3 that is housed there. This is consistent with the designation on the cover of the Area 51 Security Manual of ‘DET 3 SP,’ with ‘SP’ perhaps referring to ‘Security Police.’ ”
You could magnify a little detail into a live connection. But you could also magnify rumor — and there were certainly frauds and weird entries. It was not always easy to recognize them, and even when you did, sometimes they were more interesting than the accurate postings.
One man described his “grandpa,” who had worked, he said, at Area 51 or at Tonopah, he wasn’t sure which. The grandfather would never discuss his work, but when he was dying and had been “given Morphone and other asiditives [sic],” he finally talked. He had been given a “metal” for his work. After his death, “an onslought of Military personnel took the Metal, the Bodys and the licke” away.
Another posting offered a chronology of runway expansions at the base that read like a parody of Tom Mahood’s painstaking chronologies of events at Groom or his biography of Bob Lazar. The name of the poster was suspicious to begin with: “Robert Harry Hover.” Is that “hover,” as in the way a saucer hangs?
The detailed listing buzzed with numbers: runway lengths and elevations, magnetic bearings in degrees, minutes, and seconds. The startling and suggestive things are slipped in between the numbers so that you almost don’t notice their implications: “Only 70 Base Personnel knew of this place.” “1964 Anti-gravitation device test. Unsuccessful,” and the Delphi “1970 Occurrence Friday, September 11, at 10 PM for one-half hour.”
A British UFO magazine published a photograph its editors believed depicted the Aurora refueling over the North Sea in formation with F-111s. Steve Douglass was suspicious. He made some phone calls, checked details of the aircraft types, even the engines, and proved it a hoax. But the hoax was intentionaclass="underline" The picture had been produced by Bill Rose, an astronomer and photographer, for the English magazine Astronomy Now, specifically to demonstrate how easy it was to fake photos of UFOs or secret airplanes. The UFO magazine had taken it from Astronomy Now without permission and, in effect, proved Rose’s point.
Another time, Steve received an anonymous letter containing what the sender said were images of two hypersonic aircraft prototypes. The fuzzy photocopy showed two fighter-size aircraft said to be code-named “SANTA.” He discovered that the picture actually showed two prototype miniature deep-diving submarines designed and built by an oceanographer named Graham Hawkes.
The more cases like this you read about, the more time you spend on the perimeter, the more you tend to believe in the native human tendency to exaggerate, embroider, and deceive. There were apparently more nuts than were dreamed of in my philosophy at least. Dreamland expanded one’s sense of the native human tendency to duplicity — and to spite.
One morning, a group of the Interceptors met near Indian Springs. The day’s hike was to the top of Mount Stirling, one of the few places from which you can glimpse — albeit from forty or fifty miles away — Papoose Lake and Lazar’s “S-4,” ostensible site of saucer test flights and hangars hidden inside cliffs.
At the base of the trail, I met the Swiss Mountain Bat, the most distantly based of the Interceptors (he is in fact Swiss), in his rented Ford Explorer. The Bat had read a book called Above Top Secret, which recounted Lazar’s and other tales of secret facilities cut into cliffs and mountains and deserts in the western United States. The Bat did not find it so hard to believe in hangars inside cliffs at S-4, with door panels camouflaged as rock. An American might be dubious, but the Bat had done his three years in the Swiss military and seen all the underground hangars and command centers in a country whose laws require the provision of a bomb shelter beneath every newly constructed building. “We’ve done that all over the country,” cut into the mountains “like Swiss cheese,” he said with a big smile as we bounced up the Forest Service road.
Sure enough, when he got back to Switzerland, the Bat mailed me photographs of some of the Swiss installations. They appeared as rocky cliffs at first glance, but on closer viewing you could pick up perceptible lines, as if discerning a servant’s door in the library of a gentleman’s mansion.
He worked for an insurance company, but he seemed to live from one visit to Dreamland to another. He sold his photos of S-4 and Groom Lake to the UFO magazines. He appeared in many of the pictures and would show up on the covers of UFO magazines grinning behind his big camera lens and binoculars, in full camouflage. He regularly e-mailed the Interceptors back in the States from the Bat HQ, as he called his home. But he had another agenda, which was to prove that his country of chocolate bars and gold bars, clocks and banks and burghers, had UFOs too, and cover-ups.
“It’s no longer about chocolate and cheese in our tiny li’l country now,” he crowed in his e-mails. “Very strange things go bump in deep night over here, too.” He told of mystery radar blips and lights.
The Explorer bounced up the narrow road, but the hump between tracks was rising with the elevation. Soon we were almost straddling it. When we pulled to a stop, the sweet smell of burning sage and pinyon came from beneath the vehicle where plants had been scorched by the hot exhaust.
During the steep climb, we kept our eyes on the ground, on droppings of various animals, on red lichens — the same color as Lazar’s element 115. PsychoSpy, wearing a porkpie hat from Kmart, breathed heavily. Tom Mahood, his eyes deep-set beneath an Aussie hat, led the way. “If they were serious,” he said as the vistas began to open occasionally through the trees, “Lazar and Huff should have come up here before they went public.” They could have brought a video camera and gotten some proof of the flights, taped the rising saucers. Now even Lazar thought the saucers had been moved.