The top came suddenly. A turn and then a sweeping view from 8,200 feet; framed by pine boughs with their beads of sap visible like fresh rain, the lakes slid among the distant overlapping ranges. “There it is,” Mahood said. “The most secret place in America.”
We sat and recovered and ate. I noticed with a start that the bags of trail mix and peanuts had swollen into little pillows at over 8,000 feet, transparent balloons.
No one really believed he would see flying saucers, or even hangar doors. Nor were we here to disprove anything. It was the possibility that justified the trip. Possibility expanded our credulity.
Maps were consulted. Mahood had marked the borders of the test site and range in fluorescent pink and orange and, with his engineer’s eye, had carefully worked out the sight lines from Mount Stirling to Papoose Lake and other vistas. He squatted on a folding canvas-and-metal stool and aligned his telescope.
The test site spread out below: the geometric assemblage of Mercury, the company town where I remembered seeing ads in the cafeteria for bowling leagues. Highway 95 showed the silver slugs of trucks and the black flecks of cars. Near the entrance to the test site, you could see the holding pen where so many demonstrators had been sequestered over the years. To the east were the Ranger Mountains and a strip of public land. On an earlier trip, the Interceptors had tried to get up to the edge of the test site that way, but it was rougher and longer than it had looked, and some of them nearly collapsed for lack of water.
You could see the stubs of towers where atomic blasts had been set off, Yucca Flat, Frenchman Flat, the barely visible Command Post and assembly buildings. I imagined what it would have been like to watch the atmospheric tests from up here, to see the mushroom clouds rising from the plains, to feel — half a minute, forty-five seconds later — the vast wave of shock and heat there amid the pines.
But our attention was focused on the light strip of Papoose Lake. We should have been looking straight at the wall with the sand-colored doors of secret saucer hangars, pitched at a 30-degree angle, that Lazar had talked of. As the sun moved lower, the light molded the hills into fuller shapes. The landscape seemed to puff up and grow fuller, more sculpted, as if inflating like our little bags of food.
“That would be the way to walk in,” Mahood said. “Up Nye Canyon, across Frenchman Flat.”
To the far right you could see the airfield at Indian Springs with its little x of runways half-flattened like a folding chair from the perspective. We saw a light aircraft pass by. Then someone caught sight of what looked like a building, a blockhouse-like structure, beyond the edge of the test site.
“As the afternoon wore on, they could see more and more,” someone intoned in the voice of a television narrator. The whole experience of Interceptordom was cast by the way they figured in TV interviews.
The Swiss Mountain Bat jumped. With the light shifting, he could see the mystery building in his viewfinder. He steadied the huge telephoto lens and delightedly snapped away.
The shadows lengthened. All of a sudden a dark shape came hurtling down from the right of our camp: a great bird, concentrating on its prey, surprised to find us here. I could see its stunned look, and as it pulled up then banked away down the slope, the bird — it was a golden eagle — lost a single white feather. The down feather drifted slowly, like a parachute flare, until it landed in the bushes, and Mahood scrambled to retrieve it.
That night, back on the plain beneath Mount Stirling, we camped and built a fire of the pitiful gatherings of twisted driftwood-like pinyon and the odd two-by-four someone had left — and talked of Lazar’s shady past and proton cannons and skyquakes. The campfire carved out a cave of light, and lore and jokes flew back and forth as the mesquite burned longer than the thin, twisted sticks seemed to have a right to do. This was the closest we got, I figured, to ghost stories or the primal folktale.
Tom Mahood talked of a guy who claimed to have worked on flying saucer simulators, of a man who knew the man who did the ejection seat for the Blackbird and then for the Aurora. “My rational mind says that what you see is all there is,” he said, “but another part of me wants to believe there’s something else out there.”
This from an engineer, an exacting thinker and researcher — yet from the beginning Mahood was drawn to Lazar’s story. For all his just-the-facts-ma’am attitude, he admitted he had initially felt that Lazar was telling the truth, that he had been at S-4. Lazar’s very presence seemed to have this convincing effect on people, his sense of self-possession, almost diffidence. Mahood continued to feel that way even as more and more information seemed to discredit Lazar’s claims about his résumé and career. But the emotional link remained. For a time, it gave him restless nights. Like many, Mahood wanted to believe; the wild hopes and cosmic dreams of his heart struggled with his engineer’s head. As if in a Pascalian leap into faith, even the most remote of chances that the revelations were true provided a tempting counterbalance to the weight of facts against them.
The darkness was profound. I lay on my back in the sleeping bag and saw the Milky Way not as a collection of stars but as a smear. My eye went to Orion, the first constellation I had learned at the planetarium in second grade. Zeta Reticuli, putative source of flying saucers, was visible in Cygnus, someone had told me, but only in the Southern Hemisphere. All at once a single meteorite streaked through the Little Dipper. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself.
Driving back to Las Vegas the next morning, I thought about the shadows around the campfire. They suggested to me Plato’s cave, as updated by the class cut-up who shapes his fingers into a rabbit or duck by flashing them in the beam of the film-strip projector. Ordinary realities, kept out of sight, turn into flickering monsters on the cave wall. Captured foreign fighters become alien spaceships; nuclear test tunnels turn into a network of secret underground chambers; radar test shapes on stalks are transformed into saucers hovering above apertures to the underworld.
A few weeks after the hike, Tom Mahood returned to the top of Mount Stirling. With a different telescope, by different light, he was sure that the mysterious building we had seen was nothing more than a rock formation.
14. Black Manta
Dreamland spun me out again, this time to Amarillo, home of the famed Cadillac Ranch, where old Caddies are buried up to their tail fins, and whose name always reminds me of “Paradise Ranch.” Tracking the evolution of the tail fin, which was inspired by the fins on Kelly Johnson’s P-38 and the rocket fins of the late fifties, I understood it as a monument to a society in which El Dorado is no longer a mythical gold city but a Cadillac coupe with a vinyl top and gold-anodized brightwork installed at the dealership.
I came here to meet Steve Douglass. Although he rarely ventured to the perimeter of Dreamland, he came to be venerated as the ur-Interceptor, a near legendary figure. He was a military monitor, an interceptor of radio broadcasts, and if anyone knew what was flying, he did.
Beavis and Butt-head snickered on the TV in the living room of Steve’s ranch-style home. Then Steve popped a tape into the VCR and the boys disappeared into a powdery mix of colors. There was a silence, then solid gray-blue; then a dot emerged, grew larger, became a bat, a ray-shaped airplane swooping overhead — and finally the image dissolved into gray grit. Steve flicked the set off. “Seven seconds,” he said. “You live for those moments. You listen all those hours for that kind of gold nugget.”