Robert Stack, the host and erstwhile battery pitchman, didn’t like the antigovernment tone he saw creeping in to the piece, so they added a line to the script to the effect that “the Air Force denies the planes are theirs. So the question remains, Whose are they?” It was important for the general format of Unsolved Mysteries, as in the others, that the “question should remain.” The truth had to stay out there.
In April 1994, ABC-TV, while on a shoot, clumsily bumped into the camou dudes, who stopped the crew and confiscated its film, perhaps irritated by the fact that CNN had shortly before set up a camera atop Freedom Ridge and broadcast views of the base.
By May, the press safaris to Freedom Ridge had become so frequent, the viewing points so crowded, that PsychoSpy described a fistfight between two reporters. It amazed the Interceptors, who remembered when few knew the way up at all. In October, Larry King and entourage descended on Rachel. They set up on the side of the road, with the wrong set of hills in the background. No saucer landing in the desert could have looked stranger than Larry’s stage set — desk, chairs, lights, and coffee mugs — glowing amid the trampled sage.
Someone mailed Steve a videotape shot by two Las Vegas cops who had read about the TR3A and headed north to Dreamland. Perhaps inspired by beer, they caught sight of something in the sky that danced wildly on the tape, a sign of a camera held by uncertain hands. Their voices were audible, screaming, “It’s the fuckin’ Manta! It’s the fuckin’ Manta!” Steve concluded that the craft was probably a B-1.
All of a sudden you could find references to Area 51 everywhere. There were scenery files for the popular Microsoft game Flight Simulator that one could download from the Internet to “fly over” Groom Lake. The Marvel company latched on to Area 51, producing a comic or two, and television had embraced it.
An NBC-TV program called Dark Skies, set in the mid-sixties, featured aliens digging an underground base beneath Area 51 and Howard Hughes catching on to their plans. “We’ve got to get to Dreamland” was the most memorable line. A CD-ROM came out with the old cartoon character Jonny Quest delving first into the mysteries of Roswell and then into Area 51.
The story of Area 51 had long held special appeal to technogeeks. One of the Apple Newton software group, for instance, took an interest in it after a trip to Rachel in 1994. He hid a secret feature in one version of the software: If you knew where to click, you could picture Area 51 on the Newton’s map. If the user picked Area 51 from the map, the icons in the date book application took on an alien theme — alien faces, flying saucers, robots, and so on.
Then, in August 1995, as the story goes — and we are strictly amid the Lore here — a cryptographer at the CIA was one of the beta testers for the new program. When he saw Area 51, he went to his bosses, who demanded Apple remove the reference. Management “caved in,” the sources say, but the feature was covered over rather than removed and there is yet a trick for retrieving it.
Then the notion of overlapping the Generation X demographic and the UFO one began to swarm in the minds of marketing types — the Gen X files, that was the concept. In the second episode of The X Files, the popular show that twists the weirdness of Twin Peaks into all sorts of conspiracy lores, Dreamland was transferred from Nevada to Utah, where it became “Ellens Air Force Base.” “A mecca for UFO buffs,” like Groom Lake, it is omitted from USGS maps, and the hills above Dreamland became tall reeds — equally good hiding places.
In this version of the story, the base is rumored to be “one of six sites” to which the Roswell wreckage was shipped. There the round craft built using alien technology became triangular; the Little A“ Le”Inn is transformed into a diner with a fat lady who took UFO snapshots off her back porch. Agents Mulder and Scully see dancing lights and encounter hovering craft. They are menaced by men in black with the requisite sunglasses, and a black helicopter dives at them. There is a reference to “the Aurora project,” and dabblings with mental reprogramming. “That’s unreal,” they conclude, then, “I’ve never seen anything like that,” leaving hanging the suggestion of a causal link between the two statements.
The redoubtable engine of American marketing, as simultaneously wondrous and horrific as the military machine, had quickly moved to sell teen alienation back to Gen-X. Soon I noticed alien faces, with the almond eyes and big head, everywhere — alien jewelry, alien T-shirts, alien temporary tattoos in the malls, in the hip shops in the East Village of New York. The alien face had become a wry nineties equivalent of the seventies-era smiley face.
The image of the big-eyed “gray” alien was set in the early eighties by authors Budd Hopkins and Whitley Strieber, and it superseded earlier images of extraterrestrials. If earlier aliens had represented Communist invaders (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) or disease (Alien) or been depicted as friendly babylike creatures (Close Encounters and E.T.), this new one was a huge fetus or hungry child, with big Keane kid eyes. It was also an echo of Munch’s Scream—the very face of modern angst.
This alien face had long been familiar, but had never been so graphically standardized before. It summed up a growing American subculture devoted to ideas of abduction and implantation that paralleled a fascination with recovering childhood experiences — commonly those of abuse — via hypnosis. In 1995, Testor released a plastic model kit of a standing gray alien, proof that it had become the iconic image of the extraterrestrial, just as the flying saucer was of the UFO.
The new image of the alien was as much ironic as iconic. It was significant that we had begun calling creatures from other planets “alien” again in the eighties, after the previous decade had popularized “extraterrestrial.” Much of the new alien material turned on the puns associated with “alien”—the joke was that the grays figured as immigrants. The face had become as much a graphic cliché, an ethnic cartoon, as Sambo or Uncle Tom. Was America’s latest favorite ethnic group from Zeta Reticuli? “Do we call them Astro Americans?” a friend asked.
Tropes of the alien often serve as parables for dealing with issues such as immigration. Note, for instance, the differing degrees of irony evidenced in Coneheads (“We are… from France,” and their nemesis in the film is an INS agent) and Alien Nation, where the aliens exhibit the irritating traits of various earthly minority groups: They are ex-slaves with strange music; they threaten to take jobs and resources from Earth natives; they eat bizarre food and score intimidatingly high on math tests. Men in Black continued the theme, tossing off jokes about immigrant New York taxi drivers.
My favorite T-shirt on this theme depicts a cliché alien wearing a sombrero and bandoleers, bearing the legend: “We don’t want no stinkin green cards.”
The alien face’s iconism was accomplished when it became subject to manipulation of context and ironic reference. Thus T-shirts picture the Beatles with alien heads, or the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” trio rendered in alien faces, and a whole host of alien-face pop artifacts — earrings, Schwa artifacts, Alien Factory skateboard graphics.
The alien theme is strong in music. The band Foo Fighters recorded on its own Roswell Records label, and an album by the group Spacehog is called Resident Alien, its cover art bearing an extraterrestrial “green card.”