“At first I wanted to take pictures of UFOs and sell them to magazines and make money,” she told me. A blackjack dealer in Las Vegas, she would come up every few weeks and shoot day and night.
Ford was clearly smarting from a long history of encountering skepticism — how often had she heard that this image, say, couldn’t be a flare, or that one was surely not the effects of lens or diaphragm. She pointed out one photo that was shot on Easter Sunday, a holiday that even the denizens of Dreamland respected, she said, and on which they did not fly.
I had seen some of these snapshots on the wall at the Little A“ Le”Inn, along with all the other greasy, dusty, spotted images of lights in the sky. They were all carefully labeled with details about the camera and film used. In almost every instance, the name of the camera was misspelled. The captions included as much specificity about the time, date, and equipment as there was a lack of specificity about their content. “Two visible ships taken by Mail Box Road Cannon with 200 Zoom Kodak Gold 200.” Or, “Invisible ship with light beam going below mountain. This photo was shot facing west at Mail Box Road at 7:50 A.M. Fugi Automatic with 80 zoom, Kodak T-Max, 400 B/W.”
One word of that caption caught my attention: invisible. As in: “This invisible object appeared after I experimented with music.”
By invisible, I understood her to mean that things showed up in the photographs without having been visible when the shutter was snapped.
“That’s when I got the eyeball,” she said.
“The what?” I asked.
“The eyeball. I give them all names and this one I just call the eyeball. It’s translucent.”
Indeed it could be an eyeball, floating in front of the flash-lit, out-of-focus grass by the highway, the soft LED digits of the dating function visible in the lower right-hand corner. Emerson’s transcendental eyeball, Jung’s eye in the sky — whatever you wanted to call it.
“After I got this one I went, ‘Oh… my… God.’ I cried for three weeks. They’ve lied to us, I thought. When I saw this, everything I had read about UFOs and had dismissed suddenly became feasible and I cried, cried, cried, cried.”
I picked up the book Ford said had inspired her. The paperback cover of Silent Invasion, by Ellen Crystall, Ph.D., bore an image of an alien face, like a film still. Inside were lots of photographs that resembled Ford’s, pictures of “Tesla globes,” spaceships, even aliens in Westchester County, New York.
Crystall was the clear source of inspiration at least for Ford’s captions: The author, with her apt New Age name, had supplied the same details of camera and film type for her photos. Here was a typical Crystall caption: “Large Tesla Field. Taken: June 12, 1988, at Pine Bush, New York. Camera: Nikon 35mm SLR with 50mm lens. Film: Kodacolor negative print film (ASA 400). Exposure: 1/60 sec. at f//1.4 with flash.” Elsewhere, she supplied the name of her developer: Fotomat.
Crystall’s globes and ships could also have been drops of some kind of staining liquid on the film or lens, but she saw them as Tesla bubbles and beams and ships and aliens. She might not have seen it unless she believed it. There was a twist: While Ford had photographed UFOs she couldn’t see with her eye, Crystall claimed to have seen UFOs that didn’t appear in her pictures. Some UFOs, she believed, generated shortwave or other radiation that made them invisible. She had seen triangles in Westchester County that resembled the black planes seen in Nevada and California. But realizing that such planes were not generally tested in populated areas, she concluded that “there may be forms of stealth aircraft that are ‘true’ UFOs built and operated by human beings.”
She argues that the B-2 Stealth bomber shown to the public “is really a decoy to divert attention from where the money and effort are really being placed — namely, on construction of enhanced stealth craft capable of hovering at ground level, cruising at speeds ranging from slow walk to thousands of miles per hour, and turning invisible to the human eye. In other words — American UFOs.”
Crystall’s and Ford’s photographs reminded me of the strange and sinister forms, like malign bacteria, seen through a microscope; or of the atomic blasts in Harold Edgerton’s photographs — no vision of an alien invasion could ever conjure up a more sinister-looking life-form than these death-forms, slices of vision thinner than the human eye could seize. Ford’s photos were just as disturbing.
Invisible craft made visible — that was Ford’s goal. I was reminded of a chapter in the Air Force “New Vistas” report boldy headed “Invisible Airplanes.” The report talks about all the planes of tomorrow, unmanned, invisible to radar, to infrared, to the human eye. The fighting robot planes — UCAVs — that would succeed UAVs would have even stranger shapes. They might look like tailless triangles, like pumpkin seeds, even like discs. “Potentially,” said Air Force planners in Aviation Week, “a saucer shape could produce the most maneuverable UCAV if combined with vectored thrust for maximum lateral agility. Moreover, a weapon could be pointed by simply rotating the aircraft without altering course.”
Stealth makes airplanes almost invisible to radar but not to light, so they fly only in the dark. “We rule the night,” Lockheed’s ads bragged. But not the day. The next step was to do for vision what stealth did for radar: create high-tech camouflage.
There was pretty good evidence that some of the planes flying in Dreamland were already making themselves invisible by day. They wore electronic skins. They used a technology that was like wrapping the whole airplane in the liquid crystal display of some laptop-computer screen, turning it into a fabric that could be laid on, bent, or built up like tile, or mosaic. It was something called Polyaniline Radar Absorbent composite, “optically transparent” except when charged with a 24-volt current that triggers the camouflage receptors. They read the ambient light — its brightness but also its hue — and are adapted to match. These are chameleon airplanes.
One such program had been around for a while, called Ivy. I.V? For invisible?
I asked Steve about it: Did this mean that the reason people hadn’t been seeing any planes flying above Dreamland recently was because they couldn’t be seen? If you didn’t see them, must they be invisible? “Have there been,” I asked before realizing what I was saying, “any confirmed sightings of these aircraft?”
But sure enough, Agent X had recorded one such “sighting” near Warm Springs. He heard the whistling of a passing airframe first, then it was flying so low he felt the pressure of the air change. But he saw it, too, and he explained how: You observe an invisible airplane by seeing its invisibility — its interruption of the stars in the sky above it, and of the faint glow of Las Vegas behind it.
Ford’s photographs were confirmed sightings all right, proof that you had to believe to see. When she was taking pictures, Ford explained, “I go into alpha beta.” I looked baffled.
“You know, dream state, alpha beta. And these images are very dreamy.”
In other pictures, Ford pointed out a different sort of blob. “These here may be interdimensional entities,” she explained. They might, in other words, signify creatures from other realms of space-time.
“People told me there are interdimensionals. Aliens that can move in and out. John Lear talked about the government having EBEs—‘extra-biological entities’—and the government is having a hard time with them. They keep them in an electromagnetic field but they just drift in and out.”