Months later, as I sat watching one of those offbeat local-color features TV news loves so much, I thought I recognized a beat-up little trailer and nearby fence. It was indeed Exotic World. There was a nice sound bite from the owner, herself a former stripper: “Striptease was not invented,” she said, it just happened, when someone caught a glimpse of a dancer pushed out onto the stage too soon. “Striptease,” she said, “is a phenomenon, and phenomenons are not made, they just happen.”
I thought of the Air Force general who declared that a secret aircraft should reveal itself only gradually and seductively. Striptease was about imagination more than revelation, and so were the RCS sites: Phenomena just happened there, too. I wondered if a visit to Exotic World didn’t say more about the workings of secret aircraft than standing on the concrete of Helendale’s Upper Chamber.
21. Space Aliens from the Pentagon and Other Conspiracies
On his way to the Oklahoma City federal building, the bomber Timothy McVeigh slept in room 25 of a motel in Kansas named Dreamland. I took this information as a token of just how closely the fascination with a New World Order, a new political view of the world, was taking hold of the views of Dreamland.
The New World Order theorists had rapidly developed their own lore, decrying the influences of the United Nations and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Black helicopters and white (UN) personnel carriers were making furtive appearances. They were UFOs of the militias.[10]
On the Internet, the theorists reached such filigreed detail of conspiracy that one story even claimed the NWO would abolish all but a single chain of fast-food restaurants: Taco Bell. Believing this, who would not take up arms against the menace?
NWO lore was overlapping UFO lore. On Long Island, in 1996, Ed Zabo, an aerospace electrician, and John Ford, head of the Long Island UFO Network, were charged with attempting to poison a county Republican chairman by slipping radium into his food. Zabo, a government inspector at the local Northrop-Grumman plant, believed that the county government was conspiring to cover up evidence of UFO landings, which among other things had resulted in extensive forest fires on Long Island the previous summer. The district attorney shook his head and opined that “this all convinces me that there is a side to humanity that defies definition.”
George Bush and the speechwriters who popularized the glib but murky phrase “New World Order” to label the era that succeeded the Cold War could hardly have imagined that it would come to denote so readily such a malignant mythology. The phrase became a cipher, a placeholder, a linguistic Groom Lake waiting to be filled with speculations. I took it as a sign of the end of the Cold War, which left a yawning vacuum of uncertainty. We missed the Cold War. And I regarded the NWO’s most fervent adherents as victims of a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s not easy to take away an enemy you’ve lived with for nearly half a century. How much easier to deal with an invented enemy than with none at all; how important to the conspiracist for the world to possess an order, even if that order is dark and hidden.
The Interceptor known as the Minister of Words believed that the appeal of this dark mythology was a sign of economic distress. “The uneducated shitkicker class in this country is dead,” he argued. However prosperous America seemed in the nineties, life had gotten tougher for the guy with a trailer and a pickup truck.
But some of the early believers in the UFO cover-up were converting to a still darker view: that an even more sinister conspiracy was behind the use of flying saucers in order to drive us into the arms of the New World Order.
In the summer of 1996, I visited the national convention of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network. It was held at a North Carolina Holiday Inn, with the same tone of seriousness and self-fascination as a regional gathering of insurance salesmen or plumbing supply vendors. I noticed that no one smiled.
In one room, on acres of tables, every stripe of UFO thinking was laid out in books and videos. I felt compelled to browse something called From Elsewhere: Being E.T. in America, about the experiences of a man who felt he was an alien on Earth. You could also buy mugs and T-shirts and glow-in-the-dark alien sculptures. But my eye was caught by the cover of a book that pictured a strange pentagon and star device and the title Space Aliens from the Pentagon. It bore the subtitle “Flying Saucers are Man-made Electrical Machines. Revised and expanded Second Edition Creatopia Productions™, by William R. Lyne.” Cover lines: “Does the CIA write Movie and TV scripts about ‘aliens’? Have you been brainwashed: Does the CIA control Hollywood and TV? Did you know the flying saucer is the best-kept energy secret on earth?” The cover art showed the Pentagon as a maze. Inside it was set a swastika and an all-seeing eye, like that on the seal of the United States or a Jungian eyeball in the sky.
Lyne argues that the saucers were faked by the Pentagon or some secret group beyond and behind the Pentagon. He writes that “my ‘space aliens’ are actually people, whose philosophy and bizarre masquerade are alien to the American way of life, since they believe in government by anti-democratic hoax, to maintain the secret power of the Trilateral Commission elite, to whom our lives are very cheap. I am striking back against an ‘alien system’ which has attached itself to the nation which our ancestors strove to create, which would be invulnerable to the ‘aliens’… I have concluded that a Secret Government has watched me, attempted to control me…”
Lyne turns the Cosmic Watergate on its head. Far from being a cover-up, he asserts, the saucer stories were all a put-on — a Hollywood production to frighten us into the arms of the NWO, to create Reagan’s unifying alien threat. The saucers came not from other galaxies but from Earth. The Nazis had taken the technology of Tesla and developed flying saucers, which they used to fly to exile in South America — perhaps even Antarctica. Werner von Braun flew the flying saucers out of White Sands after the war. Hitler escaped from his bunker to South America and visited San Antonio, Texas, in 1967 as a guest of LBJ. But when Lyne — and he alone apparently — recognized Hitler and Eva Braun, they were quickly hustled away.
Lyne was always a key player in the dramas he described. He told how he had quarreled with Sargent Shriver over his dismissal from the Peace Corps and how in 1975 George Bush had offered him a high position with the CIA, which he rejected.
Lyne’s biography states that he saw his first UFO as a child in Kermit, Texas. He received an MFA in “studio arts” from Sam Houston State University; he certainly had artistic talent. His book is illustrated with obsessive and skillful drawings, part engineering diagram, part R. Crumb.
He believed the National Security Act of 1947, dividing the armed services, was treasonous, and that the Roswell incident was a hoax. The “aliens” were dead monkeys from the rocket tests at White Sands, crudely disguised. He had seen photos of them, but they were stolen by a former girlfriend. He produced drawings from memory, in his skillful but jittery style.
He rolled all the myths together, all the government cover-ups into one all-consuming conspiracy. Hitler escapes, and strange artifacts float around in the hands of old Indians in the Southwest. No topic was too large to bring into his web — Lyne delivers a long excoriation of “Platonist epistemology”—and none was too small — the powers in Detroit conspiring to squash the small, inexpensive Crosley automobile of the late forties.[11]
While the account in Space Aliens from the Pentagon possesses a singular viewpoint — all the information had somehow come to Lyne and Lyne alone — another perspective on Dreamland employs a dizzying collage of clippings and reports.
10
Black aircraft continued to become part of conspiracist mythology. During the 1992 presidential election, accusations were made stating that Vice President George Bush had secretly flown to Europe in the backseat of an SR-71 to meet with Iranian emissaries as part of the Iran-Contra deal. Only by means of an airplane as speedy as the Blackbird, it was believed, could this trip have been concealed.
11
The twisted connections between political conspiracy and saucer lore are further illustrated in