Outside the Air Force Museum in Dayton, a color guard presented arms; dignitaries straightened their ties. On the back of the chair in front of me was stenciled a collection of numbers and letters and the words USAF CHAIR FOLDING.
Interceptors were there in number. A man with a name I knew only from the Internet, where he provided specifications of aircraft present and past, right down to the tail numbers, wore a Lockheed Skunk Works T-shirt — a bit tactless, I thought, considering this was a Northrop project. He took pictures of everything that moved, including one of the cargo planes that flew overhead, then looked around a little sheepishly.
Before coming to the Air Force Museum, this airplane had been legendary at Groom Lake, open only to the handful of officers with all the necessary clearances. Again the strange principle seemed to hold true: To get close to Dreamland, you had to go far away. In Ohio we were getting a glimpse into the heart of Nevada, at a plane that had somehow traveled from rumor and suspicion to commemoration with no visible stops in between. Perhaps this was why the ceremony in Dayton seemed an odd mix — half confession, half celebration.
When the curtain was drawn, it was clear this was the ugliest aircraft most of the audience had ever seen. It was long and stubby-winged, hard to put the shapes together in your head to make a whole you could imagine flying. It looked like someone’s effort to build a big fiberglass boat from magazine plans, abandoned halfway through. From the rear, it looked like some sort of modern architectural model, a building in Brasília, say, the exhaust vent a rising curve, like a concrete amphitheater.
It actually looked like Shamu, the star whale of Ocean World, and this became the nickname that stuck. The men who built it called themselves “whalers” and wore little lapel pins in the shape of a whale. That way, they could go out into the soft liberal world full of save-the-whale types and blend right in.
They had worked in a hangar beside the Stealth prototype Have Blue. For a long time, each of the two groups was forced to stay inside while the other was outside with its airplane: special access, need-to-know. It was the other team, getting a glimpse, that called it the Whale.
Whale was right: For the Interceptors, this was a kind of Moby-Dick, a great white whale of a genuinely mysterious flying object, long-sought, long-denied, legendary and mythical, now finally admitted. But material replaced mystery with a thud: The physical object was rough and ugly. It was also weird. The first thing I thought after seeing it was Who, describing such a thing floating over his head, would have been believed? Who then could not have had his certainty shaken that all flying objects were of terrestrial origin? With revelations surprising as this, how certain were we that there might not indeed be a Hangar 18, here at Wright-Pat or elsewhere, where alien bodies, creatures, parts, wreckage might be hidden?[9]
“There was a remarkable esprit” to the project, the speeches all agreed, born of the isolation of “the remote location,” the silence of the black world, the camaraderie of the initiate. “We even did our phenomenology work in remote locations,” said Stephen Smith, one of the top managers for Shamu. By phenomenology he meant radar testing. You could see the huge antenna from Freedom Ridge, and the big balloon balls used to calibrate it. These words suggested to me, however, the same old problem with Dreamland: that of knowing what was real and what was mere perception, speculation, rumor, fantasy. Of seeing and believing.
Patriotism, the dignitaries claimed, drove the project, even though it was not wartime. Steve Smith recalled “a strong sense of patriotic urgency with respect to Warsaw Pact nations at that time.” In other words, fear of a big offensive in Europe that would overwhelm Allied ground forces and cause the United States to go nuclear. Shamu was designed to hover above a battlefield, using radars to direct thousands of “precision-guided munitions” at the hordes of invading tanks.
“There’s a reception inside, under the B-36,” the museum director announced, and the Whalers headed inside to stand under the wing of the huge plane. According to a sign, this was the last B-36 ever to fly, when it was ferried on April 30, 1959, from the boneyard at Davis-Monthan to Dayton.
At the reception, Steve Smith explained that he was working in Iran in the seventies, helping the shah’s air force with its new F-20s, when the call came from his boss. He was being sent back for a special project, but was to be told nothing else until he was “brought in.”
He was briefed on the third floor of a dark parking garage at a hotel in the San Fernando Valley, he recalled, “like Deep Throat. It was real cloak-and-dagger stuff.”
The man in charge of the Tacit Blue program also stood beside the B-36. Jack Twigg was an Air Force colonel, detached to DARPA. Twigg was perfect for the part, always looking as if he were laughing at some private joke. He was never seen out of a sport coat, shirt, and tie, Smith recalled. “Everyone thought he worked for us, for Northrop.”
“I had the haircut,” Twigg interrupted with the air of a man who always likes to be in charge. “I had the crew cut, and that was the only thing that gave me away.”
Most of the wives and many children were at the ceremony. And that illuminated something it was easy to dismiss: that working in secrecy diminished the lives of the workers. It’s not just that they couldn’t answer the question, “Daddy, what did you do at work today?” but that their family lives could be jeopardized by the black hole of nondisclosure, which could quickly fill with suspicion. Security, one black worker said, was like wearing a lead raincoat.
The question could never be avoided: Was it really the job, or was it something else? A guy could be making it all up because he had a bimbo in Burbank, a floozy in Floral Park — hell, a whole second family someplace, or a bad gambling habit, or an unsavory job with organized crime. There were cases of con artists who pretended to be working in Dreamland, or some other secret facility, or for the Skunk Works.
Was there any sharper symbol of the isolation of the black world than the “hello” phone, the one-way dead-end telephone number given to families of those working at secret facilities like Dreamland?
In Blue Sky Dream, his memoir of growing up with a father who worked in SAR programs, David Beers gives a child’s viewpoint of all this. His father worked on Star Wars projects for Lockheed’s missile division, near the mysterious Blue Cube, the spy satellite control center in Sunnyvale, and during the eighties was dispatched to a place that may very well have been Dreamland.
He was gone for days and weeks to a place the mysterious people on the phone called The Ranch.
“Hal there?” an extremely serious male voice would ask whoever picked up the receiver at my parents’ house.
“No, can I tell him who called?”
“Tell him Gunner called. From The Ranch. He’ll know.”
What was this Ranch where Ronald Reagan had created new work for my father and for “Gunner” and for how many more? My mother and her children were curious, of course, but we had only the slimmest of details with which to construct a mental picture. We knew a man would find himself in some very high and precarious places at The Ranch, because one time my father returned wearing a strange pair of glasses, clunky plastic frames bought off a drugstore rack. He had lost his, he said, “while stepping onto a catwalk. I bumped my head and off came my glasses. I heard them hit the floor about, oh, eight to ten seconds later.” My father smiled as he said this, smiling as he tended to smile when he had just told you something that was very intriguing but just shy of violating his security oath.
9
Steve Douglass was astonished to see the pictures of Tacit Blue. He had seen this plane, he told me, before he’d begun investigating secret aircraft. He and his wife had been on vacation in New Mexico when they caught a glimpse of the thing sailing through a canyon, almost below them and the road on which they were driving. Indeed, it was that sighting that piqued Douglass’s interest and inspired him to look into the whole world of secret planes. But at the Air Force Museum ceremony, there was no reference to the testing of Shamu in New Mexico, which probably occurred at the White Sands radar cross-section testing facility.