Was Hollywood supplanting the Pentagon? Would the Dreamworks movie studio be the future source of Dreamland’s technology?
“Calling all ‘Encountered People’!” read the proclamation that appeared on the Internet in August 1996. An outfit calling itself Zzyzx Productions and “The Center for the Study of Aerial Phenomenon” announced “Abduction, live at Area 51. An all-night political action rally and UFO-watching vigil” and “rave party.” The fine print coyly declared an intention to “encourage peace, love, and harmony, so leave your ray guns at home.” The tickets, twenty-five dollars a pop, would be available through TicketMaster.
That seemed reasonable for a pass to Area 51, only the party turned out to be scheduled for a lot behind the trailers in Rachel. The music would be techno — the robotic dance stuff of the new Germany, steeped in the dust of the Wall, now imported, manipulated, and cut to street strength. The idea seemed to be that the fellows at the base might warm to this New Age Woodstock. What I was hoping for was something more like the Saucerian conventions at Giant Rock.
The road was familiar to me now, but it seemed somehow different — richer — with each trip. The landscape’s browns and tans seemed to contain rather than exclude colors, if not outright reds and greens, at least what the red and green brown might dream of being. In the little settlements along the way, a few optimists attempted to fight the browns of the desert by painting their houses and stores in bright aqua or turquoise. It took me a while to see how shrewd a choice that color was, how that turquoise sang out against the landscape. It was the direct opposite and a powerful antidote to the oppressive hue of the desert.
On the way up to Rachel I stopped for gas. As I paid and came back to the car, I noticed a world-weary guy with a sleeveless shirt and a beat-up pickup. “How are you?” I asked.
“A little closer to somewhere,” he answered, as if trying to convince himself.
And I almost said, “But still a hell of a long way from anywhere.”
When I finally reached the Black Mailbox, I spotted a Camry with Arizona plates parked beside it. I pulled over to talk to a young couple who stood looking off toward the Ridge. The man was a stockbroker. “They say this is the place,” he commented, dreamily. “We drove all the way from Tucson, just to see.”
The most romantic thing about the rave was the dust swirling in the big floodlights. The promoters had promised “sunbaked desert dance dirt,” “fire-breathing tribal drum circle,” and all-night dancing in the shadows of the Jumbled Hills. They held open the possibility that the boys at the base might be tickled enough to float one up just over the Ridge, offer a hint of the mysteries beyond. The partygoers I talked to knew of Area 51 only as a saucer site. They were ignorant of the history of the U-2 and the Blackbirds.
In Rachel, the locals — piqued by the prospect of drugged and drunken youth from as far away as Los Angeles — watched with interest. The sheriff’s office required the promoters to post a large bond, and deputies’ cars patrolled the area. Strange vehicles — Woodstock-era Microbuses, junker compacts with out-of-state plates — began to appear in front of the Quik Pik and the Inn.
At the Research Center, some of the Interceptors gathered to watch. In the little yard by the trailer, they dipped chips and roasted hot dogs and marveled at the speed with which the media machine had latched on to the mythology of Area 51.
“It’s become the dominant urban folk legend of the nineties,” Zero said in the kitchen, unwrapping more chips. Behind the trailer was a little shed with a platform on its roof that turned out to be handy for viewing the preparations. We climbed up to look at the assembling trucks and lights and speakers. It was Little Freedom Ridge, a mini-Tikaboo, but it would bear the weight of only three or four people.
I had checked into a motel up the road in Alamo. The lady at the desk told me they had a special deaclass="underline" two bucks extra for five channels of TV, five dollars for the cable and ten channels more. I went the whole hog: a better rate per channel. Besides, I felt a need to stay close to the umbilical cord of mainstream culture.
I lay down for a few minutes in the afternoon and in a groggy sleep dreamed that I had figured out the secret of the numbering system for the areas at the test site, which appeared randomly on the map. It all had to do, I dreamed, with an angle of the border of each area from the north-south axis. When I awoke and looked again at the map, I realized the dream scheme made no sense at all, that it was these sorts of angular alignments that the supporters of the Mars face, the believers in ancient civilizations and secret bases on Mars and the moon, used to support their case.
The individual’s dreamwork is echoed in that of his culture. The same strategies of compression, substitution, abbreviation, displacement, and symbolism Freud sees in individual dreams may apply, I realized, to the shapes of tales in the Lore.
If you believed that dreams were worth looking at as a way to understand a person’s hopes and fears, then wouldn’t looking at the dreams of a culture accomplish the same thing? Couldn’t the fascinations of its core be written in the obsessions of the fringe? A tunnel at the nuclear test site evolved into a network of underground railroads, perhaps, a MiG was transmuted into an alien ship, a flare into a saucer’s light. I thought of the tales of the footprints of deer melting out in the sun into those of the imagined Yeti.
Any dream expresses a wish, Freud states, but how could some of the dark and frightening dreams I had heard be wishes? They saw the source of the fear discharged, was Freud’s answer. They granted a wish, too, for order and explanation — dreams crystallized vague fear into a specific bogeyman, which one could better comprehend. Couldn’t the fear of a new world order be an expression of a desire for order; couldn’t the arrival of aliens save us by organizing us to resist?
The souvenir vendors had arrived first thing in the morning. The latest item was a T-shirt showing a saucer over the lake bed and the legend “Area 51 Yacht Club.” One vendor, an enormous man selling glow-in-the-dark alien heads, T-shirts, and charms, told me he used to be with Navy Intelligence. He sat in a minivan beside the Rachel Quik Pik, wearing a SEAL team T-shirt and an LAPD bomb squad cap.
“Naval Intelligence,” he repeated. “Ever hear of Richard Marcinko? Seal Team Seven. It’s not supposed to exist, but it does.”
He had strong opinions on Bob Lazar’s story. “That W-2 is as real as can be,” he said.
That night, huge screens surrounded the circular dance floor, flashing music-video images back on themselves, reminding some of old drivein movie screens. But only a few dozen dancers showed up, groggy after the long drive dodging the cows that sat on the edges of the ET Highway. The bitter alkaline dust stung the eyes and seeped into every fissure of clothing and body.
A few misguided Hollywood types ended up in town. At one point a limousine turned in to the parking lot and I caught a glimpse of a softly lit interior, packed with cut-crystal decanters glowing like artifacts in an old-fashioned sci-fi film. Then the dust rose up and covered it all.
The UFO souvenirs failed to sell well. At the end of the evening, I caught sight of the Naval Intelligence man still sitting in the minivan. There was no evidence he had ever left it.
25. Remote Viewing; or, “Anomalous Cognition”
At the rave, the promoters had lined up a series of real-life “abductees,” who sat at card tables arrayed under tents looking ill at ease. Among them was a woman who did not claim to be an abductee but was willing to talk — a lot, very fast, and in run-on sentences — about black helicopters, Tesla, thought bubbles, interdimensionals, and portals. Her name was Kathleen Ford, and around the time I first climbed the Ridge and looked down on the base, she’d begun taking pictures of strange floating or flying objects along Mailbox Road, looking west over the Jumbled Hills toward Dreamland.