Thinking of Them!, I drove west from Edwards toward the place known as the Anthill, cleverly disguised as Northrop’s radar cross-section testing facility, west of Willow Springs. From Trader I learned how to get there, driving past shopping centers and the Willow Springs racetrack, bright with painted ads. The trip was a wonderful excuse to go badassing along primitive roads in a 4-by-4, playing rough road rock-and-roll. Once out of civilization, I followed a dirt road named, perhaps ironically, Broken Arrow. Broken Arrow, of course, is the military code name for an incident involving the loss or theft of a nuclear weapon.
Someone had painted a bright blue warning skull on the rock at the turnoff for Broken Arrow Road, beneath the metal sign with its cincture of welded letters. Broken Arrow was a western Mojave road as hard as the iron of the sign. Here and there were ugly ruts and cracks where the road had dried and split open. At other places, gray clay creeks appeared. At one turn, a false trail, I came to a barbed-wire gate and a jackrabbit flattened on the road, in the pose of a leap, as if captured in midair by a strobe flash.
At last the odometer showed I was close. I parked and scrambled up a hill. Over the horizon I could see all there was to see: a couple of buildings, a radio antenna or two, a water tower. No evidence of underground structures. No air vents, no strange doors. All I saw were signs of new water management facilities — canals and culverts. Nothing suspicious, although it was through the sewer system that the ants in Them! had raced most dramatically. To the suspicious, such innocent stuff was the whole point: The underground was a version of that oldest of menaces, the unseen.
The underground can also be understood as the unconscious — the source of dreams and psychoses. To those who believe in the underground bases, this analogy is more specific. To them, physical levels are indications of levels of information and security, and also perhaps of psychic levels: The deeper the facility is dug, the deeper the conspiracy. If a vision of things below the surface represented the “cover-up” in literal form, connections among them represented the extent of hidden links. Tunnels, the theorists argued, tied the sites together — sinister hidden connections made manifest. The accounts included stories of workers who had ridden the rails from the beach in Los Angeles to Area 51, with connections available to Los Alamos and Sandia. Were Amtrak so well run, it would put the Japanese bullet train and the French TGV to shame.
Thus Area 51 connects with Edwards and Sandia and Los Alamos, and even with the most terrifying of the projected underground facilities, Dulce, on the Archuleta Mesa in New Mexico. Level 4 is concerned with telepathy and dream control. Level 6 or 7 holds the vats with the embryos of half-breed human-aliens and other grotesque genetic experiments. It is known in the Lore as Nightmare Hall.
The underground conspiracy buffs tend to equate security levels with physical levels. Twenty-four or thirty-eight levels of underground installations correspond to the same number of levels of “clearance.” But in the actual black world, it’s not just a matter of higher or lower clearance from sensitive to secret to top secret to “Q” but of separation on the same leveclass="underline" of different rooms on the same floor. In reality, there is not only distinction among levels but distinction among rooms, so to speak, at the same level.
In their descriptions, the Lorists seem especially concerned with doors. As if they were film production designers, they describe in detail access panels, sliding cards, retinal readers, weight-triggered access doors. Many door controllers or speakers are in the shape of an inverted triangle. The inverted triangle is linked in other parts of the tales to the trilateralists and, more implicitly, to the existence of layers below the surface: It’s the inversion of the pyramid on the dollar bill and the great seal of the United States.
The end of underground theories is to see the earth itself as hollow, to imagine not just a hell beneath our feet but the world as a mere shell. In this ultimate version of conspiracist theory, Nazis fly the saucers they have developed into the center of the earth through hidden portals at the poles. “Commander X”—former “Military Intelligence Operative” and author of Underground Alien Bases—has the Nazis colonizing the center of the earth in cooperation with “Serpent People” aliens. He believes that “in reality, many of the craft seen over Area 51 in Nevada are not constructed by aliens. They are instead experimental vehicles derived from the secret plans of German scientists, many of whom were brought to the U.S. and given political asylum, even though they may have taken part in vicious war crimes.” The Nazis perfected anti-gravity and time-warp transportation, X also tells us, and landed on the moon before 1945.
Hollow-earth theories are as old as the Egyptians, of course, but as recently as the nineteenth century they were taken with some seriousness in the United States. The hollow-earthers populated the center of the earth with all the features and creatures later theorists and science fiction would transfer to other planets. Before there was an expectation of space travel, the interior of the planet was the most distant region imaginable. So A Journey to the Center of the Earth would give way to A Trip to the Moon.
In 1819, John Cleves Symmes propounded his theory that our hollow earth contains five concentric lands. James McBride explained it all in the following decade in The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres, “demonstrating that the earth is hollow, habitable and widely open about the poles.” One writer of the time imagined the land inside as “a white land,” full of the whitest of humans. In the 1830s an odd character named Jeremiah Reynolds began promoting a South Pole expedition to prove Symmes’s theory. Amazingly, he prevailed upon the U.S. government to fund not one but two such expeditions. One result was the production of very useful marine charts of the southern waters. Another was to inspire Edgar Allan Poe to write such stories of possibly hollow worlds as “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “Descent into the Maelstrom,” and The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym.
To see the earth as hollow was ultimately a vision of profound despair. It meant we literally could not trust the ground upon which we stood. It meant life itself was empty. Edward Shils wrote of “the torment of secrecy,” the pain of those who believed that all history took place behind a veil of some kind of conspiracy, that the real motivational forces in the world are unseen, perhaps undiscoverable. This is a hard philosophy to live with.
Helendale, in California, the largest of the RCS sites, is the newest such facility. It is huge, with its own runway, near which Aurora was thought to have been spotted. Its main radar area, called, sinisterly enough, the Upper Chamber, seems to cover acres of concrete.
To reach it, I cut through from the highway that ran east of Edwards AFB, then drove over the white sandy bed of the erstwhile Mojave River, past trailers and little houses. I could see the distant hangar — Lockheed yellow — and turning up the road, I came to the fence and gate that barred the way.
To the left of the gate, shoved up practically against that fence, there was a place called Exotic World, a sort of museum celebrating burlesque culture, the home of an old stripper who has collected the G-strings of the great strippers of the past.