In two videotapes entitled Secrets of Dreamland, a man named Norio Hayakawa, who had led the Japanese TV crew to Bob Lazar, had produced a carefully, not to say obsessively, documented depiction of a vast conspiracy swirling about Dreamland like a dust devil.
The tapes are made up mostly of footage of a lecture Hayakawa had given to a religious group called the Prophecy Network. He makes token gestures to an apocalyptic sort of Christianity — probably for the benefit of the audience, whose favorite book of the Bible is the infinitely interpretable Revelation. The lecture is generously illustrated with clips about exotic military programs for mind control, electromagnetic warfare, lasers, and exotic aircraft from such sources as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Aviation Week. The lecture is followed by home-video footage of flying saucers along Mailbox Road: lights jumping in the sky and turning on the proverbial dime.
UFOs, Hayakawa concludes, are part of a created threat designed to stampede the populace into accepting the New World Order. He reports, “Dreamland is said”—that passive tense again—“to be an acronym for Data Repository Establishment and Management Land. It will be the center for a future satellite linkage system that will centralize all global computer data network systems.
“A device known as Battle Engagement Area Simulator and Tracker (B.E.A.S.T.), developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and [to] be launched into orbit under the auspices of DARPA, will link all global data network systems in the air.
“The Beast”—yes, the noted Beast of Revelation—“will be some type of a super-computer linking station launched into orbit in a few more years. It may link stations emitting hologramic images into the atmosphere to control the ‘thinking’ patterns of the populace.”
In the hours I had spent watching Hayakawa’s Secrets of Dreamland videotapes I had noted his shift toward the conspiratorial. There were two tapes, released a couple of years apart, and between them was a subtle change in emphasis, extended even to the packaging, and an apparent shift in his target audience from the youfers to a New World Order conspiracy audience. It was not only good marketing, reflecting a changing world, but indicated a change in Norio’s thinking. He believed that the Rockefeller Foundation in North America and the Rothschild financial conglomerate in Europe are an integral part of the entity known as the Bilderbergers, which plans to establish the New World Order by the year 2002.
“The Lord,” Hayakawa announces, “is literally coming to catch his believers in the air. A mass confusion will take over the world.” I wondered at that moment whether he had ever heard the Louvin Brothers’ song “The Great Atomic Power,” in which the victims of the A-bomb rise to meet their savior in the air.
His argument draws equally from scripture and Aviation Week and goes like this:
The New World Order, a secret government, is using UFOs to frighten us into accepting their tyranny. Strange new technologies are controlling us, including holographic projection and other forms of mind control.
“It is my opinion,” Hayakawa insists, “that an elite group of globalists has always believed that the ultimate way to create some type of global unity was to create an artificial threat from elsewhere. It could be war, disasters, worldwide calamity, et cetera, to create an artificial ‘crisis.’ But the ultimate one is to create an external threat from ‘outside,’ and the most convincing one will be an ‘alien’ threat from beyond earth.
“To this end,” he intones, “I believe that we have slowly been brainwashed and manipulated to believe in the existence of ‘extraterrestrial’ entities. Look at the proliferation of ‘alien’-related films and TV documentaries and semidocumentaries. I think that this is all a part of the conditioning process that is preparing us psychologically to accept the ‘alien’ presence and sensitize us to the ‘alien threat’ in the very near future.”
He talks of devices to control minds, some of which may cause temporary memory loss. Certain chemicals are used, and equipment. There is reference to a Dr. Igor Smirnoff — very much his real name — who developed an acoustic device for mind control. Work is going on at Wright Patterson Air Force Base to create brain-actuated airplane controls.
Hayakawa delves into some Joseph Campbell — like interpretations as well. The legendary Majic or MJ-12 from UFO lore is traced to symbolic code words, an occult term from ancient days, linked to magi, or wise men.
The secret government is sensitizing us, he says, preparing us for the takeover. The clips from the popular press prove this. “When The Washington Post says so, it is already done.”
Hayakawa narrates the video clips of his saucer-chasing expeditions that follow his lecture, like an appendix in a book, in a very different voice. “The intensity of sound stunned us,” he says breathlessly in one. “You could physically feel the noise from eighteen miles away.” There are shots from Freedom Ridge, a bouncy, smeary view of the base at night, and a red glow. Is it a plane? “It might just be a car,” says a voice on the sound track. “No,” another voice, overflowing with excitement, counters. “That’s a ship. See, there are trucks around it?… They’re getting ready to send it up.”
Because of these videotapes, I ended up one August day in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo. I stepped from the heat into the cool dark lobby of a Japanese American funeral home. It stood near a toy warehouse in an area not so much ethnically colorful as ethnically triumphant: architecture as slick and corporate as Tokyo’s, a Buddhist temple in its own little park, a series of looming brutalist apartment buildings with mall. At one edge of Little Tokyo stood a replica of a building from the internment camps, a tattered barrackslike building that might have been pulled from the wreckage of an abandoned training base — the old Tonopah, say, or Indian Springs.
I waited in front of a sign that read SLUMBER ROOM VIEWING. A sweet odor filled the air, and somber Japanese Muzak drifted by. Then a friendly man emerged: Norio Hayakawa, UFO buff, Area 51 researcher, and full-time funeral director.
I had e-mailed Hayakawa, asking to talk to him, and he agreed. He delicately warned me not to mention UFOs if I called him at the funeral home. “You know how it goes,” he said, in the tired phrase of many saucer buffs trying to get by in the more mundane world.
I wanted to hear how Hayakawa would tie Dreamland into the Book of Revelation, a dangerously heady elixir for preachers and prophets of many shades.
It turned out to be a little more complicated: Hayakawa went easy on the specific biblical references, hailing a more general “spirituality” that, along with the unification of the various militias, he sees as our best hope of salvation.
After the teeming conspiracy tales of the tape, I hardly knew what to expect of Hayakawa in person. He was gracious, friendly, disarming. We drove to a restaurant on the edge of Little Tokyo. He was honored by my visit and interest, he told me, but he seemed weary, tired of it all.
“My main thesis,” he pronounced, almost as if by rote, “is that highly developed technology could be utilized to stage a fake alien invasion to desensitize us to intrusive authority and shocking revelations.
“I think it’s always going to be a mystery. It will never be solved. Or by the time we find out what is there, it will be too late. We won’t find out until all hell breaks loose.”
In his lecture, Hayakawa points out that the year 1947 was when all these strange things began to happen: the founding of the Air Force and the CIA, the Roswell crash. He does not mention the death of Bugsy Siegel and the bankruptcy of the Flamingo, the transistor or the Truman Doctrine or Yeager’s first flight through the sound barrier. When I asked, he explained that he traced his own fascination with what he called “the UFO phenomenon” back to that year, perhaps because in 1947 his father, a fisherman, looked up from his boat off the coast of Japan and saw a strange light in the sky.