An associate professor of political science at Emory University named Courtney Brown, whom Ed Dames had taught RV, had established an outfit he called the Far Sight Foundation, and claimed to be able to view inside the Oval Office and to visit secret bases on the moon and Mars. He envisioned our Mars probe being destroyed by a defending alien craft. When he appeared on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast radio show, he suggested that the comet Hale-Bopp provided cover for an extraterrestrial spaceship that was heading for our planet.
The Heaven’s Gate cult latched on to Brown’s idea and stuck out their figurative thumbs to hitch a ride. Before their mass suicide, they visited Las Vegas and played the slots; some members may have attended a conference on Area 51.
Ford’s notion that the camou dudes could remote-view, however, was a new one on me. So was the idea that the presence of these remote viewers might take the form of glowing balls.
“Does it really work?” I asked her.
“Sure, I’ve been taught how to do it. First, you have to give yourself permission to let yourself invent. And when you understand it’s okay to make it up, then they start to appear and you say to yourself, ‘Hey, I didn’t make that up.’ ”
“Can you remotely look over the hills here and see what’s on the other side?” I ventured gingerly — over there, into the base at Groom Lake, into Area 51, into Dreamland.
“Sure,” she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I’ve been there. It’s empty.”
26. The White Mailbox
Maybe Kathleen Ford was right, maybe the place was “empty” (whatever she meant by that). Maybe the secret warriors had folded their tents under cover of night and crept away. Maybe the cuts of the post — Cold War years had reduced the role of the base. Maybe the glare of publicity had made operations untenable.
I remembered the statements a congressman made at the time Whitesides Mountain was annexed to the restricted area. The watchers, he said, were a tremendous inconvenience to the men at the base. They had to shut things down when the watchers appeared. “It’s not fair,” he reported, almost petulantly. Bill Sweetman thought that the cost of doing business in Dreamland had priced it out of the market, that in the new, austere Pentagon, all the security and expense of moving things in and out was too much. He thought the projects had moved elsewhere.[15]
In another sense, of course, it had always been empty, and that was its attraction. We needed it empty to function as a container for speculation. You could fill it up with whatever you wanted. Or maybe we had all emptied it, squeezed out every bit of speculation, overtaxed that humble collection of Butler metal buildings and big hangars and military-issue dorms, demanded too much meaning from it. Perhaps Dreamland was full now and could hold no more of our speculations or fantasies.
On the Internet, you could find this sentiment: “I hope we never find out what’s in there,” a buff wrote rather wistfully. “I’d just like to observe something about us Area 51 freaks. As much as we talk about wanting to know what goes on in there, I think that’s all just posturing. What would happen if the U.S. government opened its doors to us and let us see all that was going on? Depending on what is there, we’d be either vindicated or disappointed, but we would also rapidly lose interest. What would we focus our attentions on? Where would we go next?… The greatest thing about Area 51 is its mystery, otherwise nobody would care.”
To push suspicion to the limit, some speculated that Groom had long been a kind of Potemkin village, designed to draw attention away from somewhere else, to hold down the armies of watchers the way the plywood tanks and fake maneuvers of Operation Fortitude held down Panzer divisions before D-day.
Maybe the real projects were going on at some long-rumored “new Groom,” or “baby Groom,” in Utah, in New Mexico, in Alaska, in Australia. “The new Groom” became nearly as fabled among the stealth watchers as the original, or as El Dorado among the conquistadores. Was it at Eielson Air Force Base, in Alaska, where Agent X kept his eye out but whose vastness made Groom look like a golf course? Or Pine Gap in Australia, perhaps — rumor had it that several Northrop aerodynamicists, including the legendary John Cashen, had moved to Australia. To Utah, near Dugway and the dreaded storage area for chemical and germ warfare weapons? One top aviation journalist, who told me everything had been moved from Groom, said, “We’ve heard the pulser jet in the Southeast, out in the swamps.” Or was it all moved, as Steve Douglass had heard, to a new secret base over the hill from White Sands in New Mexico? Steve Douglass and I went to look.
I had driven across the lava plains north of the White Sands Missile Range, a few miles north of the Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated. I had passed the northern entrance to the range, called Stallion Gate, when a white Blazer with official plates fell in behind me. The driver was speaking into a mike, its corkscrew of cord trailing behind. I imagined him checking up on me and grew nervous for no reason.
I passed through the Valley of Fire, a landscape of rough stones that resembled coral, as if a whole beach of lava had been laid bare by a receding tide. There was a rolling quality to the depressions and outcrop-pings, and you could almost imagine that the rock was still liquid. Driving across it, I could understand how looking at the relentless distance day after day could inspire despair — the despair early settlers felt and tried to treat with whiskey and patent medicines.
Steve and I parked across from the fence at Holloman Air Force Base, where the Aquarius briefings said the saucers had landed for treaty negotiations, and Stealth fighters transferred from Tonopah trained in daylight now. Traffic whizzed by with a heavy rush. Binoculars offered a terrorist’s-eye view of a base that was like a movie set of an airbase: tower, water tank, palm trees. The F-117s kept taking off over our heads, along with black T-38s. The shadows slid across the pavement, which itself shimmered in cheap mirages.
The next day we stopped by the local BLM office, located in a modern sandstone structure trying to look like WPA Moderne and failing. Three empty government-issue office chairs held a conference in the lobby. I noticed that they were the same kind of chairs as in the photographs of the Roswell wreckage, in Gen. Roger Ramey’s office. I suspected I was overconnecting again.
We looked through the big maps, flipping page after page until we found the right ones. Steve focused on the valley west of the mountains that sheltered Holloman and the space harbor.
We stopped at a Dairy Queen to study the maps. A Mexican man with a black Mephistophelian beard but contradictorily patient and gentle eyes walked in. On his shoulder was a tattoo unlike any I had ever seen. I tried not to stare at the tattoo, but it was irresistible. It showed a shapely woman wearing nothing but a gauzy blouse and bandoliers of cartridges. The more I looked, the more the image seemed to deepen and become solid. It shimmered like a printed reproduction of a photo — stand far enough back and the dots merge, the image comes to life. Depth establishes itself behind surface, signal overwhelms noise. I wanted the message of the maps to become that clear, to tell us openly whether there was a new base, and where behind the mountains it was hidden.
We focused our search on the Oscura Mountains. There was a new restricted airspace, number R5107, and we first studied the aeronautical charts, the spaces marked mostly purple and brown, then looked at the more variegated palette of the BLM maps, indicating the usage and ownership of land with its melons, blues, and yellows.
15
Even author Dale Brown dismantled the Dreamland of his fiction: In