Television could handle the pop-alien theme with equal facility as drama or comedy. “Aliens are all around us,” intones the narrator at the beginning of Third Rock from the Sun, a sitcom in the tradition of My Favorite Martian, Mork and Mindy, and ALF—a view of the outsider as observer as old as Montesquieu’s Persian Letters.
In the series Dark Skies, the alien invasion turns out to have been so subtle and surreptitious that it has touched every major event of the last fifty years, from the shooting down of the U-2 to Project Mercury to the Kennedy assassination. Conspiracy theorists are alienated by mainstream explanations, of course. Concealment and conspiracy is another theme behind the image — it was the logo of the Big Cover-up, the “Cosmic Watergate.” “The government is lying,” T-shirts told us.
In time, the alien face came to appear to me as the face of suspicion of government — and the projection, perhaps, of the new generation’s alienation. “We are not alone,” the slogan that often captions the gray face, may be as much an expression of hope as an assertion of belief. Someone once said, “Aliens are alien because we alienate them.” That was ALF, the sitcom alien.
By the spring of 1996, Hollywood was turning the Lore from folktale to fodder for commerce. The Interceptors were at once amused, irked, and perhaps a bit sad, resentful that the Hollywood dream machine was taking over their base, dismayed at a crass mercenary effort to cash in on the Black Mailbox.
The idea behind renaming Nevada Highway 375 the Extraterrestrial Highway was to bring tourists to the area. When the Nevada legislature held hearings on the idea, the only witnesses to appear — and they were in favor — were Joe and Pat Travis, the largest likely economic beneficiaries of the idea, and Ambassador Merlyn Merlin, himself an avowed extraterrestrial.
PsychoSpy took a hard line against the renaming, more, one suspects, out of an instinct to oppose government than for his stated reason that no thought had been given to the consequences of bringing tourists to the area and possibly into contact with the camou dudes. If anything, he felt his own bailiwick was being invaded — he was after all the first to produce a tourist guide, the first to lead groups to the perimeter, the first to pioneer four-wheel drive to the top of Freedom Ridge. Now it was all about selling souvenirs. Yet PsychoSpy himself had set this all in motion when he printed up his first T-shirt bearing the invented Dreamland patch.
The dedication of the ET Highway and the unveiling of the road signs that marked it was a ceremony twice hijacked. The first time was by the producers of the film Independence Day, which would dramatically change the Area 51 Lore. Whetting anticipation for the summer ’96 release of the movie, its stars agreed to join the ET Highway dedication, and the producers donated a “time capsule” to Rachel. This guaranteed that the politicians would be overshadowed.
In front of the Little A“ Le”Inn, actors Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum moved among a thin crowd and posed in front of the signs as Nevada tourism officials explained that prospective visitors could call an 800 number for an “ET Highway Experience” package complete with map. The governor joked that perhaps the signs should have been placed so they could be read from above.
A well-known state legislator named Bob Price, an eccentric and colorful character who led “fact-finding trips” to the cathouses, appeared in Darth Vader costume. “You’re Bob Price,” shrewdly commented a Rachel youngster, looking right at him.
“The only aliens I’ve seen are the people who visit here,” a little girl told Mary Manning, the reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and this youngster was more correct than she knew.
The event was hijacked a second time on the highway itself. While PsychoSpy boycotted the dedication, the Minister and Agent X rode along in the convoy, which began in a parking lot in Las Vegas and headed up to Rachel for the unveiling of the official ET Highway signs along Highway 375. They portrayed the silhouettes of flying saucers and — no ET here — an F-117 in silhouette.
Agent X led the way in a rented red LeBaron; the Minister’s CRX was in fifth place. There were about thirty cars and a big charter bus. As they came down from Hancock Summit into the Tikaboo Valley about thirty miles south of Rachel, just at the point where the Groom Road stretched out to the west, looking as always like a pole of dust rising straight into the air, the Minister caught sight of a bright yellow sign stuck into the dirt by the roadside, with an arrow to the left and the official ET Highway logo. Soon the whole convoy was rumbling in a cloud of dust down the dirt road, straight toward the Area 51 perimeter.
It was a plot by the Interceptors, code-named Operation Coyote, after the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote, who is constantly posting fake road signs to divert the Roadrunner.
The Minister decided to pull off before he got to the guard shack he knew lay a few miles ahead. He understood the rule: You’re under arrest once you get to the shack, which is on the wrong side of the perimeter.
Then a Nevada highway patrolman realized what was happening and came roaring up, siren wailing, lights blazing. Through the dust ahead, the Minister could see the lead car taking a sharp right-hand turn onto a dusty road that doubled back toward route 375, through the Medlin ranch. But the planners of the diversion had clearly hoped that it might go all the way — the governor of Nevada and other dignitaries, the whole motley movie and business crowd arriving at the perimeter. Hell, at the guardhouse!
Independence Day, which set box-office records by grossing nearly $150 million in its first two weeks of release in July 1996, established Dreamland in the popular mind — but with a twist. The film provided a key new link in the Lore. It tied Area 51 directly to Roswell, whose legend was also growing daily. While, of course, the traditional story had tied Roswell to Hangar 18 at Wright-Pat, the legendary repository of recovered saucers and bodies, Independence Day’s story had them ending up at Area 51. At one point, the president says disdainfully, “I can assure you there is no Area 51.” “Well, Mr. President,” the head of the CIA responds, “that’s not… exactly… true.”
Area 51 becomes the headquarters in the movie from which Earth resists invasion. The president asks the questions we were all asking about Area 51. “How come I wasn’t told about this place?” “How did they keep this secret?” “How did they pay for it all?” But since Area 51 ends up saving humanity, the implication is that we should be grateful it was there. Thus millions of people heard about Area 51 for the first time.
Hollywood’s Area 51 looks more like we’d imagined it than the real one: It is slicker, shinier, more sci-fi. The film conjures up an underground lab with tilted glass walls and aliens stored in giant lava-lamp-like containers. It’s packed with high-tech equipment: all the war rooms and secret labs of a dozen films of the past rolled into one. It looks, in fact, something like the Area 51 in the video game.
In the early nineties, Ed McCracken, the CEO of Silicon Graphics, whose workstations are used both to devise new aircraft designs and to produce movie special effects, declared that the demands of mass media had supplanted those of the Pentagon as the engine of technological innovation. A 1996 Air Force report on the future, called “New World Vistas,” declared that “entertainment organizations” had the skills and means to produce better simulators than the military.
Was Hollywood supplanting the Pentagon? Would the Dreamworks movie studio be the future source of Dreamland’s technology?