We trudged across White Sands, aiming at the tower of the old Northrup Strip. Now they called the old strip “Space Harbor.” All we could see were the top of its antennas and water tower, which barely peeked above the white dunes in a thousand advertisements, when it had stood in for the Sahara, and for Mars.
Steve had been here before at night. Creeping over the brow of the last dune, whiter than white by moonlight, he had seen the base unfold, crisscrossed by huge laser beams and dotted with multicolored lights. Word had it they’d put in the most powerful runway lighting system on the planet. The shuttle astronauts could see it from space. They’d landed here once when bad weather spoiled the usual landing strips at Edwards or the Cape, and for the first time the TV crews were kept away from the landing.
Now in the daytime we crawled across the sand. The more we looked at the maps, the more we drove and wandered through the rippled dunes, the more hopeless and foolish we felt. You would have to have up-to-date satellite photos, an airplane, and free access to the airspace to have even a prayer of finding anything.
Yet there was always a Dreamland somewhere down the road. Its very name kept turning up in the oddest places. I learned of a barbecue place in Alabama and a spiritualist outfit in California called Dreamland. One Area 51 buff recorded with excitement, “So, I’m driving back from Costco, listening to the rockabilly show on KCMU and, I am not making this up, this song comes on about a rockabilly cat who meets up with a space alien.” The alien asks to be taken to some place called “the Dreamland Bar and Grill.”
“This New World Order is quite fucking real,” Joe Travis said from behind the bar. A few minutes later he launched into an informal karaoke version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, which had come on the radio. It lent a nice air of menace to his warning. But Joe’s act was wearing thin. There was a new mood around the Inn. Tourism in Rachel had become a tired joke—“Area 51” was the punch-line — and some of the Interceptors were becoming embarrassed by the whole thing. The Minister had had enough of the Interceptor gatherings, and Mahood issued a “final report” decrying Lazar as a liar and went off to graduate school to study physics.
Campbell, for his part, was growing both more distant from and more possessive of the place. When a magazine report, riddled with errors, charged that Area 51 had been shut down and its activities moved elsewhere, he reacted not just with derision but with something resembling personal affront. He saw himself as webmaster and moderator now, and something like superintendent, too.
When it seemed interest might be waning and new material about the base growing scarce, he even manifested an interest in stories of black aircraft that he had previously shunned. He recounted, with uncharacteristic credulity, a tale of seeing aircraft land on the base and then disappear, as if taxiing underground.
At the same time, he was tiring. In the summer of 1997, he married Sharon Singer, his former assistant in the Rachel Research Center, and began to spend more time in Las Vegas with her and her children.
Much as they might denounce the abuses of government secrecy, the watchers had been drawn there by the mystery, and it seemed to me mystery was a thing in short supply in the contemporary world. That was why so many TV shows and movies worked so hard to provide it. Just as wilderness feeds and nurtures a society that is overcivilized, mystery nurtures a society that is overinformed. The unknown and unpredictable were rarer and rarer qualities in a world of vast information storage and retrieval systems, of sophisticated planning, scheduling, and prediction. We had a fundamental need for uncertainty (as much as we do for order), but not necessarily the kind government secrecy provided. In the spring of 1997, a report from a congressional committee that brought together such odd bedfellows as Jesse Helms, Pat Moynihan, and Lee Hamilton proposed declassifying anything older than ten years, with, of course, the usual “special exceptions.” The committee estimated that there were some one and a half billion pages of classified documents more than a quarter of a century old. It was a huge time capsule, requiring expensive maintenance.
The usual talk of means of “penetrating” the perimeter continued: a model airplane, a balloon, even a radio-controlled model car. Norio Hayakawa had his own scheme. He began talking of a “Million Man March” to the perimeter on June 6, 1998, the date he had said provided a conglomeration of multiple sixes, when something dark and dangerous would happen.
One Saturday in late April 1997, four SUVs pulled out of Rachel and drove north on Highway 375. About twenty miles north of town, they turned left on a gravel road, rambled toward Dreamland, and pulled up to the new perimeter line of the restricted area.
Some twenty kids emerged and began setting up easels and canvases in a neat line, about six feet apart and at a 45-degree angle to the vista. Led by a man named Joel Slayton, who taught at San Jose State University, these young art students were collaborating on what Slayton called “a site-specific conceptual artwork involving landscape painting as countersurveillance of Area 51.”
Painting the landscape in old-fashioned oils and acrylics, they were members of “the CADRE institute” (Computers in Art and Design/Research and Education), who thought deep thoughts about the nature of art and information and how computers figured in to it.
As camou dudes trained their binoculars, Slayton felt a little creepy. What the dudes made of it all, one can only imagine.
The group hauled their finished paintings back to Alamo, where they drew a curious crowd at the local gas station, just around the corner from the first ET Highway sign.
Slayton’s official manifesto declared, “The social banality of landscape painting and painters was strategized to be used as a means of countersurveillance by the surveyed, serving as a no-threat typology of threat. In this context the artists demonstrate a perception of art as safe and innocuous, permissible and lacking in relevant information content. The need to surveil such activity is both necessary and unnecessary simultaneously.” Now Dreamland drew artists, who drew it.
The camou dudes, Slayton thought, were “serving as a critical agent to assess the significance of the event and resulting information liability.” The whole exercise, he proclaimed, constituted “critical discourse on the nature of information culture and information systems.” It also seemed a pretty good parody of us serious watchers of the area.
Slayton kept calling the place “a simulacrum.” No longer a real place, I understood, but “a reality constituted from media folklore, super secrecy, and the government’s denial of its very existence.” It existed “only as pure simulation, constructed from the voluminous decentralized and publicly assessable [sic] information that surrounds what might be there.” It was a “composited identity formed of electronic networks, e-mail correspondence, and media folklore. Area 51’s notoriety as a physical and virtual tourist attraction provides a cultural experience as information simulation ripe with conspiracy theory, Hollywood-style potentialities, and the guarantee of being surveilled.”
At PsychoSpy’s Research Center, the paintings were placed on sale for $51.51 each with a 51 percent commission going to the Center. Buyers were asked to document the location in which each painting would be hung and to “engage in dialogue” about the whole experience via e-mail.
One frequent visitor to the perimeter happened to see the group and grew suspicious. He was sure they were some sort of security force. They had short hair, he noted, and looked like camou dudes. If they were painters, he said, then he was a B-1 pilot.