The premise of the game is that a saucer, or other craft, has been recovered and its occupants have taken over the base. The player must get inside as part of a special SWAT team and battle “alien-infected personnel,” a handy means of conflating evil, nonhuman expendable aliens with traditional images of bad guys wearing berets and overalls — the type that die by the dozens in Hollywood action films. Boxes and barrels surround the place; there are hot fighters and tough humvees scattered about. A panel truck bears the designing firm’s name, Mesa Logic.
The premise will come as no surprise: Shoot ’em fast as you can as they pop out from behind boxes and vehicles or dash along catwalks. Hangars make fine settings for shoot-outs. The ultimate goal of the game is to “penetrate” far enough to set off a special nuclear destruction device and rid the planet of the invading scourge. I couldn’t help noticing, a little wistfully, that winning the Area 51 game meant destroying Area 51. But when I played, I never managed to get very far inside the perimeter before running out of ammo and lives.
With Tom Mahood’s detailed time line of Lazar’s life in hand, I drove around Las Vegas on my own personal Lazar tour. I passed the WELCOME TO FABULOUS LAS VEGAS sign that marked the beginning of the Strip. I wanted to get a sense of the place where Lazar was said to have “pandered”—the Newport Cove Apartments, site of an alleged brothel. A few blocks off the Strip, I found them: a complex with thick pseudo-adobe walls and the wavy red tile that was supposed to signal Spanish style but looked instead like giant clay lasagna. This was not a dump or a cheap hotel but a fairly high-class if anonymous set of apartments. WELCOME HOME! a sign shouted.
I passed the familiar Glass Pool Motel, one of my favorite places in Vegas, even though it represented a minor gimmick for the Strip, which was in its fetal stages here on the edge of town as if foreshadowing for drivers entering the city the fountains and swim-up bars that lay ahead. But I took it as an early, touching bit of entrepreneurial show business: The pool was raised above ground and fitted with portholes so you could glance in at the swimmers. It reminded me of old-style aquariums, where you could see porpoises through portholes, then go upstairs to watch them leap. I liked it because it still had an amateurish quality to its showbiz, although now the water looked none too blue, murky and uninviting.
I stopped by Lazar’s old house, where his first wife had committed suicide. It was empty now. It stood on a nice, quiet street, exactly the kind TV reporters flock to when someone is hauled away on a stretcher, the neighbors telling them that they would never have dreamed of it in a thousand years. The concept “safe house” leaped to mind.
I headed back east past the Janet terminal and came to the edge of the Hughes Industrial Park on the other side of McCarran Airport. This was Dreamland’s navel, as it were, the umbilicus connecting it to the real world. The contractors who served Dreamland were clustered here on the map that would double as an organizational chart. There, in neat, slick glass boxes of low buildings, like stereo components arranged in a store, were Wackenhut and SAIC, in the same building as Bechtel. Lockheed sat on its own little loop — Kelly Johnson Drive! — across from EG&G Special Projects.
A gardener was working around the sign proclaiming EG&G SPECIAL PROJECTS. That word special again, as in special forces, special weapons, special operations. Having run most of the Nevada Test Site’s operations, directly or through its REECO subsidiary, having hired guards and owned aircraft, and now operating most of Dreamland, EG&G had come a long way from the labs at MIT where Harold Edgerton had started out.
The man who had invented stroboscopic photography was great PR and beloved at MIT. Harold “Doc” Edgerton’s images of bullets passing through apples, and footballs indented by the toe of a kicker, turned technology into showbiz. They reached a wide public, the Life magazine sort of audience, and showed science not as equations or test tubes but as something fun and exciting and amazing. MIT president James Killian, who had headed the commission that recommended building the U-2, would coauthor a book with Edgerton on his photographs.
Edgerton’s photos also represented a turning point in the way twentieth-century man saw the world. In his standard History of Photography, Beaumont Newhall writes that strobe photography had “gone beyond seeing… and brings us a world of form normally invisible,” which fixes “forever form never detected by the unaided eye.” It revealed what art critic Rosalind Krauss would later call “the visual unconscious.”
Edgerton’s photographs captured the dreams of everyday vision, the moments that slept beneath the waking level of ordinary sight: frozen bubbles and bullets, and the magical crown created by the splash of a drop in a pail of milk.
Born in 1903, Edgerton spent most of his childhood in Aurora, Nebraska, a science-fair whiz kid. In the late twenties he experimented with argon lamps and developed the stroboscopic method of photography, a bright, extremely short flash of light in sync with the camera shutter.
He was fascinated with aviation, having seen the Wrights fly at Fort Myers, Virginia, in 1909; during World War II, reconnaissance aircraft were equipped with his strobes. Edgerton’s flash illuminated crossroads and town squares in Normandy the night before D-day, documenting the placement of German troops.
By the thirties it was clear there was too much money to be made with the strobe not to commercialize it. With his key associates, Herbert Grier and Kenneth Germeshausen, Edgerton established a company to commercialize the equipment for industrial clients. Strobe photographs could reveal the inner workings of machines, and, adapted, strobes would pace the party of the sixties — their dreamy lighting inducing reveries while dancing to rock and roll — and sometimes trigger epileptic fits. The strobes later went underwater with Jacques Cousteau and discovered the wrecks of the Titanic and the Monitor. But their most important use would be in capturing the milliseconds of an atomic explosion, tracking the fireball out from its plutonium kernel, so that Life magazine could reveal the unfolding of the nuclear blooms that obsessed its readers.
Edgerton’s cameras were at Eniwetok Atoll in 1946 and, a few years later, at the new Nevada Proving Ground, set up on a seventy-five-foot tower seven miles from ground zero. There, they captured the nuclear explosion in the moment it hung like a leukocyte, a terrifying organism blown from micro to macro size.
It soon became clear that triggering a camera to take a picture of an atomic blast was very much like triggering the blast itself, and EG&G became one of the AEC’s chief contractors. EG&G didn’t just photograph the bombs, it helped to explode them. It produced thyratrons, krytrons, and other detonators. And soon EG&G was running all sorts of things at the test site, such as the building and operation of the blast doors in underground tunnels, which would close in a millisecond.
For the DOE, EG&G developed special bacteria to remove radioactive components from the soil, and it grew top-grade mercuric iodide crystals on space shuttle flights in 1985 and 1992 to serve as the heart of new types of extremely sensitive radioactivity detectors. As the Cold War wound down, EG&G began to look to civilian work. In 1993 it obtained a new contract to manage the space shuttle launch and landing complexes for NASA, a task that, according to the company’s annual report, required a “200-man uniformed security force and SWAT team.” It also ran facilities for separating tritium — the heavy isotope of hydrogen used in nuclear weapons — from helium. It had branches in Langley, Virginia, in Florida, and in West Virginia.