No longer the standard arched rural route job approved by the U.S. Postal Service, it was now a big box of heavy steel, whose door swung on two heavy hinges, with a grab handle from a workshop cabinet and locked with a bright brass padlock. Steve Medlin had stenciled on it his name and route in black.
I walked all around it and noticed that someone had stenciled a tiny black skunk on its back end — a wry comment, perhaps, that this thing was built like the Skunk Works would build it. But it was white now, white as the camou dudes’ Jeeps, white as Darkstar, white as the celebrated whale.
At the Little A“ Le”Inn, I asked about it. “He got tired of people shooting at it,” Joe Travis said of Medlin. “Shooting up his mail and all. Made a new one out of quarter-inch steel plate. Now it would take a thirty-ought-six.” He snorted a little laugh.
The steel might resist, but the white paint couldn’t. Soon after it went up, someone spray-painted the new box black. Medlin repainted it white. I got the idea this might go back and forth for a while.
There was a black mailbox out in front of the Inn now, but Joe said it was just a replica. I asked what had happened to the original. A man on the stool beside me said that it had been sent to be auctioned off a while ago to raise money for town recreation, but a producer from Hollywood had preempted the sale with an offer of fifteen hundred bucks. This seemed appropriate, but as with so much in Dreamland, it proved impossible to determine conclusively.
Dedication
For my father
Acknowledgments
Many people helped along the way, sometimes in a manner appropriate to Dreamland — without being conscious of it. Steve Douglass and Stuart Brown were vital as sources, inspirations, and friends. Paul McGinnis deserves special mention for help and patience in teaching me all sorts of things. Glenn Campbell deserves commendation, not just here, for his help, but from the public, for his advocacy. The late Ben Rich of the Skunk Works was articulate and honest.
I owe debts of instruction and direction to: John Andrews, Michael Antonoff, Eric Baker, Jim Bakos, Wally Bison, Peter Black, Dale Brown, Lowell Cunningham, R. C. “Chappy” Czapiewski, Mike Dornheim, Mark Farmer, Bob Gilliland, Peter Goin, Joshua Good, Jim Goodall, Norio Hayakawa, Steve Heller, Steve Hofer, Gene Huff, Dean Kanipe, Jon Katz, Frank Kuznik, John Lear, Preston Lerner, Tom Mahood, Mary Manning, Dave Menard, Peter Merlin, Randy Rothenberg, Barry Sonnenfeld, Bill Sweetman, Jonathan Turley, Tim Weiner.
John Pike and Steve Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists, Derek Scammell at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, Matthew Coolidge at the Center for Land Use Interpretation have all been helpful in this and many other projects. Special appreciation to Randy Harrison at Boeing, Doug Fouquet at General Atomics, Jim Ragsdale at Lockheed Martin, the estimable Drs. Young and Puffer at the Edwards Air Force Base Flight Test Center history office, and Sgt. James Brooks at the Nellis Air Force Base public affairs office.
For support in work whose subject matter abutted and whose investigations abetted this project: Kevin Kelly, John Battelle, Amy Howarth, John Plunkett, and Louis Rosetto at Wired; Anita Leclerc at Esquire; Connie Rosenblum and Fletcher Roberts at The New York Times; Katie Calhoun, Richard Snow, and Fred Allen at American Heritage; Chee Pearlman at ID; and Richard Story at Vogue.
Thanks to Tom for a vital clip on military monitoring and to Ben for a vital tip on the New World Order. To Steve Guanarccia: I really am going to return your copy of In Advance of the Landing, soon and gratefully.
Thanks to excellent book editors along the way: Walt Bode, Bill Strachan, Trevor Dolby, but especially to David Rosenthal, for his vision and confidence, Ruth Fecych, for her care and patience, and the eagle-eyed Benjamin Dreyer and Evan Stone. I am grateful for years of help and advice from my agent Melanie Jackson.
My most important debts are to Kathy, whose support went far beyond her excellent reading and editing, and to Caroline and Andrew.
There were a number of people, of course, whose requests not to be mentioned by name will be honored here, but who cannot escape being appreciated, and thousands of others from whom I learned much through postings and comments on-line.
Bibliography
Assembling these authors and titles, I was struck with a mischievous sense of how the accidents of alphabetization put sworn enemies side by side, pose the conspiracist beside the technologist — a further reminder of how weirdly disparate are the little Dreamlands so many observers have created. It’s as if all were lined up — on Freedom Ridge, say — for a group photo.
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Timothy Green Beckley. The UFO Silencers: Mystery of the Men in Black. Inner Light Publications, 1990.
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Howard Blum. Out There: The Government’s Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials. Simon & Schuster, 1990.
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Courtney Brown. Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth. E. P. Dutton, 1996.
Dale Brown. Sky Masters. Donald I. Fine/G. P. Putnam’s, 1991.
Dino A. Brugioni. Eyeball to Eyebalclass="underline" The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Random House, 1991.
C.D.B. Bryan. Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at M.I.T. Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Robert Buderi. The Invention That Changed the World. Simon & Schuster, 1996.
William Burrows. Deep Black. Random House, 1986.
Martin Caidin. Fork-Tailed Deviclass="underline" The P-38. Ballantine, 1971.
Glenn Campbell. The Area 51 Viewer’s Guide. Self-published, 1993.
Glenn Campbell. A Short History of Rachel. Nevada, 1996.
The Center for Land Use Interpretation / Matthew Coolidge. The Nuclear Test Site: A Guide to America’s Nuclear Proving Ground. The Center for Land Use Interpretation, 1996.
Chuck Clark. The Area 51 and S-4 Handbook. Rachel, Nevada. 1995.
William Cooper. Behold a Pale Horse. Light Technology Press, 1993.
Paul F. Crickmore. Lockheed SR-71: The Secret Missions Exposed. Osprey, 1993.