CADRE’s project made my line of inquiry seem positively casual and unpretentious. Its members weren’t interested in aircraft or saucers or holographic experiments; they were interested in philosophical “dialogue.” They were among the most abstract visitors yet to the perimeter, highbrow, high-thinking but, from my perspective, jesters still. If I had once naïvely thought that by identifying the physical craft in the airspace of Dreamland we could then solve its riddles, satisfy the conspiratorial and the curious, I now understood that no rational explanations would satisfy CADRE.
Still, the military soon began to take CADRE seriously as a threat. While some observers on the perimeter were sure that CADRE’s painters were cleverly disguised government agents, some government agents apparently suspected that they were spies or infiltrators. It happened like this: One of the CADRE members had inquired of the Nellis base historian — who had shown me big, locked file cabinets and had so little to offer about UAVs — if Nellis had received any e-mails inquiring about Area 51. This was purely an exercise, since he assumed none would be released. Not long afterward, he was sent, by anonymous e-mail, a list of e-mail addresses at Nellis. Whether this was a prank or a piece of mischief remained unclear, but Nellis authorities were not amused when CADRE forwarded reports of its activity to those on the list. Nellis had been spammed.
In June, a few months after an April “paint-in,” Slayton saw a van trailing him. The FBI looked into his activities, and the IRS suddenly manifested an interest in the finances of CADRE.
Then the group sent a party to the land, about forty miles away, owned by Michael Heizer, the artist who lived on a huge tract of land near Complex One, his largest work to date. When several CADRE members, young enough to view Heizer as a legend, tried to enter his compound and pay a visit, he proved highly unappreciative. Slayton told me that Heizer threatened to charge them with trespassing. So Heizer’s place, I hazarded, had become a kind of little Area 51? Exactly, Slayton said.
Incorporating Dreamland into a high-concept work of art, as Heizer had, made me speculate again about just how artful were Area 51’s own deceptions. Consider that faceted camouflage, the essential form of military deception, of visual disinformation, had been born in art. During World War I, Picasso and Braque stood watching tanks and other camouflaged vehicles roll through the streets of Paris. “Look,” Picasso said, “we are the ones who did that.”
The principles at work in this most basic form of deception were the same as those of secrecy. Camouflage, like Cubism, offered bits and pieces, shards and facets. Multiple viewpoints, multiple possibilities — that was all that was needed to create noise, to disguise the real signal. Breaking up the shape into parts was the equivalent of compartmentalization, the most valued intelligence strategy.
When I had begun spending more time on the Net tracking stealth chasers and youfers, one day, on impulse, I did a search and typed in one word: “dreamland.” The Internet, I knew, was well dotted with UFO and black-plane links and sites, but only one reference came back: to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Dreamland,” stashed away in a university collection of great works of literature.
Poe is the patron poet of Dreamland. In The Power of Blackness, my old professor Harry Levin had written, “Poe seemed at home only in Dreamland.” He dreamed, another critic has written, quoting a famous phrase of the poet’s, of “a happier star.” Poe is considered among the “Southern Gothic” writers, those authors W. J. Cash described as “romantics of the appalling.” Romantic and appalling — which describes what has happened in Dreamland very well.
Read just right, squinting under the Nevada sun, the poem anticipated Nevada’s own Dreamland. “Eldorado” turned into a big old Caddy like those parked at the cathouses west of the restricted area, and “the weak human eyes unclosed” or “darkened glasses” evokes long camera lenses or night-vision devices. “Haunted by ill angels,” well, there was the U-2, Kelly’s Angel, and whatever other strange winged objects you wished to invoke. “Out of Space — out of Time” recalled Lazar’s description of the saucer propulsion system, stretching the space-time continuum, warping gravity, like a hammock’s net. The “black throne” stood, of course, for the rule of the black budget.
There was the dry lake itself, I began to fantasize, in the poet’s “Lakes that thus outspread / Their lone waters, lone and dead.” Warming now to the job like a conspiracist making connections, I latched on to his “fringed lid.” A playful look at the security lid, to be sure, and the “fringe” groups who visited there.
There were even stories that the Poe poem had been the inspiration for the control tower name — suggesting that sitting out in an isolated base leads to more reading than might otherwise be expected of military types.
Thinking about Poe carried me back to Freedom Ridge, and what I once saw flying in the airspace of Dreamland: ravens, Poe’s totemic bird. My mind then leapt to the raven I had seen in another place, which was closed off but visible, another black box: Poe’s own room at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.
Young Poe had lived there in 1826, before he was expelled from the university for failing to pay his gambling debts. The wooden door has been replaced with glass, as in a bank or department store. Visitors push a button and a dim light comes on. You can see a crude rope bed with Jacquard coverlet, a desk, a pen, and — some historical license — a stuffed raven. A black bird in an almost black room.
The preservation of such a room as a viewable but unreachable space, part memorial, part exhibit, strikes me as very like the Groom Box. It was like the black world itself — a special exception, a dark chamber in the white and stately colonnade of American life and polity. Thinking about Poe’s room, I believe I better understood where the dark visions of the black world fit into the ideal of American order. In the secret vaults in the capital where SAR programs are reviewed, a heart of darkness behind the bright classical façade. In the Black Mailbox itself.
One summer day in 1996, I headed back up the road toward Rachel, catching a glimpse from Hancock Summit of the hazy, hovering white stick of road that led to the base. As the road curled around and began its long subtle dip — the Mailbox Road stretch — I settled back into the familiar unfolding of the landscape, the Joshua trees, the range of Jumbled Hills to the west. Coming down the big dip, I nearly drove off the road as something caught my eye: The Black Mailbox was white!