The sign that warned NEXT GAS, 110 MILES was a good enough reason to stop in Rachel, up the road from the Black Mailbox. But Joe Travis and his wife, Pat, who had taken over the Rachel Bar and Grill in 1989, didn’t sell gas. They cleverly renamed the place the Little A“ Le”Inn and packed it with pictures of planes and UFOs, patches of military units, saucer paintings, UFO models, and such knickknacks. They had a “stealth bomber” patch that showed — nothing. There were painted portraits of aliens by Jan Michalski, an armless Belgian who lived in Nevada. On a small shelf they established a lending library of UFO- and stealth-related books and videos. Behind the Inn stood trailers with rooms to rent, done in a style that could be called generic crime scene. The only thing missing was the chalk outline on the floor.
Most days, Chuck Clark was there. “Chuckie”—as the Interceptors derisively called him — saw his first UFO in August 1957, near his home, just six miles from the Skunk Works in Burbank. There was a flock of them, he told me, and he recounts how F-89s were scrambled to chase the shapes. A crowd had gathered to watch.
He came to Rachel to pursue his study of astronomy in the clear air, and his interest in secret airplanes and flying saucers was just a sideline. He had seen Aurora, he said, one cold winter night, and he talked of how the aliens might come from “another dimensional reality” or how they might be time travelers. He was calm about these possibilities, as if including them in his analyses just to be fair.
It was unfortunate, however, that when Clark grinned he turned into Howdy Doody, a grin he must have had as child, fine on a freckled boy of six but disturbing on a man of fifty, and suggesting — it wasn’t a charitable thought but it was an inevitable one — an arrested development. This, I suspect, is why the diminutive “Chuckie” managed to stick.
According to the map in the phone book, Rachel was compounded of triangles, although its street plan was not readily discernible from the first view of the trailers beside the desert, like a cove full of boats. One side of a triangle was Groom Road, the back entrance to the base. The Little A“ Le”Inn anchored the north side, the rival Quik Pik the south. And at the center of the town stands a radiation recording station that measured possible fallout from the nuclear test site to the southwest, set neatly upon a little plot the way the statue of a Confederate soldier might be placed in a small (but never this small) town in South Carolina.
Civic spirit in Rachel is aptly represented by the most popular contest at the annual town fair. A checkerboard is marked off in the dust with numbered squares, and after bets have been taken, chickens are released. The object is to correctly name the square on which a chicken will first excrete.
Once the town was on its way to “site.” That is the Nevada map euphemism for ruin. (Ghost town generally indicates a “site” brought up to tourist ruin standards.) Then in 1973 Union Carbide began mining tungsten and the town, once called Sand Springs, was reconstituted, like a dried shrimp in a science kit, then renamed after the first child born under its new economy. But young Rachel Jones would die just three years later, after her family had moved on — a victim of the Mount St. Helens eruption. Place of death was recorded as Moses Lake, Washington, the site of another secret test area, used by Boeing.
The Inn was renamed after the Lazar craze began to bring UFO tourists to the town. That was Joe and Pat’s initial marketing inspiration. The rest flowed from that: the coy “Earthlings Welcome” greeting, the collections of alien masks and UFO snapshots, the menu with “Alien Burgers.” Joe let it be known that he had once worked at the base, and did not discourage the impression that the Inn was the prime watering hole for workers at Groom Lake. And Pat told eager tourists and press — the Weekly World News and later The Wall Street Journal—that she believed the place was guarded by an alien named Archibald. Behind the bar where Joe Travis always stood, beside the sign that reads THANK YOU FOR HOLDING YOUR BREATH WHILE I SMOKE, was another message to visitors: WE DON’T HAVE A TOWN IDIOT. WE ALL TAKE TURNS.
In February 1993, Joe and Pat decided to hold a conclave of UFO buffs, which they boldly titled “The Ultimate UFO Conference.” Bob Lazar arrived with a female companion, in a Corvette, and Gary Schultz spoke. Norio Hayakawa, creator of the Secrets of Dreamland videotape, played country-and-western music in a corner. It was cold and windy, but the crowd outgrew the Inn. Joe set up a large tent outside and when he was asked where he had gotten it he said, “The boys at the base lent it to me.”
At the other end of town was PsychoSpy’s trailer. Glenn Campbell, aka “the Desert Rat,” had been a computer programmer for a successful software company on Boston’s Route 128 when, in January 1993, fascinated by Lazar’s story, he moved to Rachel. The anagrammatic quality of the nickname, psy and spy, struck me as right on: This guy was different from most of the on-line characters swapping lore.
Glenn was in his activist mode that week, decrying secrecy and waste. His circulars opposing the takeover of Whitesides and Freedom Ridge proclaimed the base “a sacred temple to waste, inefficiency, incompetence, mismanagement, and maybe even fraud.” It was absurd to pretend that a huge base didn’t exist, he argued, when in fact anyone with breath enough to make it up the mountain could see it. You can’t say about a whole base “You didn’t see that” and have credibility. The government’s policy of denial was breeding mistrust; the government was alienating its own citizenry. “The stories of alien spacecraft at Area 51 cannot help but thrive,” Campbell argued.
Driving back down to Las Vegas I passed through rain and saw a double rainbow off to the east, arched from mountain to mountain. I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it myself, as the sighting reports say.
At home much later, when I listened to my tape recording from my time on the Ridge, what came through was the noise of the wind, hissing, flickering, licking. Much noise, little signal. Or was the noise itself the signal?
3. “They’re Here!”
In 1989, what seemed a clear signal emerged at last from the noise around Dreamland. Bob Lazar claimed to have worked on flying saucers hidden near Groom Lake. The gawky technician’s story grabbed the attention of not just wide-eyed saucer buffs but a wider audience of the curious. Some believed he was telling the absolute truth; others were intrigued by the belief that he could be telling the truth. Bob Lazar brought to the borders of Dreamland people who had never heard of the Skunk Works.
In person, or on radio or television, the unassuming Lazar broadcast a believability that grew from his lack of stridency. Calm, almost diffident, he worked a charm that fascinated even those it did not convince. Tom Mahood, a hardly credulous engineer, who researched many of Lazar’s claims and found holes in the story of his life, never lost the sense of how subliminally persuasive the man was. His matter-of-factness lent possibility to a story that rendered in cold print seemed outlandish and weird.
In essence, that story went like this:
I saw flying saucers in Dreamland. I worked on flying saucers owned by our government in an area called S-4, at Papoose Lake, south of Groom Lake. I thought I was going to work at Area 51 but was taken in a bus with blacked-out windows to a place where I saw the saucers.
I learned of antimatter reactors used to bend gravity waves fueled by element 115, a reddish orange substance, of which we have about 500 pounds and which comes in discs the shape of half dollars. I had one but the government stole it back.