Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  Is that a ruin? No, obviously, because people work there, stop there; when I visited, I found a cash register on the counter and a Mustang parked outside. But somehow the lingering trace of human activity made it seem more lost, not less. The faintness of what was present made what was absent feel so vast.

  I’d been streaming my playlist on the Sentra’s speakers. As I pulled in to Albuquerque, “Sleep Walk,” by Santo & Johnny, came on. The unnerving quaver of that steel guitar, which keeps bending back on itself, like a snake swimming. It sounds beautiful until you pay attention, and then it sounds unbearably sad and strange.

  The sun was setting over Albuquerque. Cathedral-ceiling clouds. The light reflecting on the city was like disintegrating violet. Central Avenue here is one of the best-preserved stretches of urban Route 66, and there it was, the famous antique neon, the row of historic motels. The Crossroads. The Nob Hill Court. The Monterey, which advertises “luxury rooms” and “European hospitality” for nonsmokers. The Westward Ho!, whose sign is a neon cactus. The Premiere, whose sign is the word “motel” on blue and orange circles, each letter on its own circle, arranged top to bottom: MOTEL.

  I checked into my room and went upstairs for a drink.

  * * *

  On the hotel roof, looking out at the nighttime city. Headlights glimmering between banks of motel neon. Sense of mountains somewhere out there, stars. I was drinking gin and lost in my own thoughts (was it too late, had I already ruined everything) and I remembered the question the rental-car clerk had put to me. The one who’d seemed so skeptical about my recent life choices, not that she’d been wrong.

  Why was I going to Area 51? It wasn’t as if you could show up and take a tour. Area 51 was no longer secret—that is, its existence wasn’t, having been formally acknowledged by the CIA in 2013; before that, it was officially a non-place, occupied but unconfessed, somehow real but also not. But even after that formal admission, whatever went on there, alien related or otherwise, was hidden in top secret midnight. To find out, you’d need a level of security clearance it took security clearance even to know about.

  And it wasn’t as if the site itself was accessible. Geographically, Area 51 is part of the Nellis Air Force Base Complex, the New England state–sized military training and testing Xanadu in the desert northwest of Las Vegas. But it operates on its own, via protocols of impenetrable ghostliness. The Internet told of unmarked backcountry roads, of navigation via baleful-sounding landmarks (“the black mailbox”). Of unmarked white pickup trucks that sat on high hills, watching. The front gate, near the minuscule town of Rachel, Nevada, wasn’t even a gate, I mean it didn’t close, was what I’d heard—there was just a sign telling you to turn back in the middle of what was otherwise fathomless emptiness.

  Your wisest course of action, the Internet felt, was to listen to the sign.

  “Area 51” was probably not even Area 51’s real name. We don’t know where the term came from. It first shows up in a declassified CIA document from 1967, where three “Oxcart” planes—a code name for the Lockheed A-12 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft—are said to be deploying “from Area 51 to Kadena” for surveillance of North Vietnam. Beyond that, the name’s origin disappears into a tangle of competing hypotheses. The base has been a locus for UFO sightings since the 1950s, when Project Aquatone, the U-2 spy plane program, started sending very high-altitude aircraft over the Nevada desert under conditions of extreme secrecy. For civilians on the ground, those were UFOs in the technical sense, unidentified objects that flew. But Area 51 only became mainstream famous in 1989, when a man named Bob Lazar gave an interview on Las Vegas TV.

  Lazar claimed to have worked at the site, reverse engineering alien spacecraft. Said he’d encountered elements not on the periodic table. He talked about alien entanglements in human history going back ten thousand years. Lazar’s claims were torn to shreds by critics; it turned out he’d possibly lied about his education (MIT) and background, and there were plenty of reasons to think he was making the whole thing up, but other details checked out. He knew things he shouldn’t have known, and some of those claims could be verified. When the National Lab at Los Alamos said he’d never worked there, for instance, he produced a W-2 showing otherwise. So there was a controversy, which put Area 51 on the map and, in the same motion, took it off it.

  I’d seen Lazar in person that winter, at the International UFO Congress near Scottsdale, where, after a show of reluctance, he’d agreed to give a Q&A. Before that he’d been in what he portrayed as a self-protective withdrawal from the UFO community, which he blamed for ruining his life. He’d been busted in 1990 for his involvement in a prostitution ring. Some people thought that discredited him. Others thought the opposite—that he’d been set up because he was telling the truth.

  I thought he seemed weary more than anything. Weary from problems of his own making or because the government really had tried to ruin him, who knows. He’d slumped in his chair onstage, a hangdog guy with a thin face and a toothy ’80s-nerd quality—the Bill Gates who lost.

  Lazar didn’t call the place where he said he’d worked “Area 51,” though; he called it “S4.” The CIA was known to use the term “Groom Lake,” but that was merely the name of the nearby salt flats. People who worked at the facility were said to call it “Dreamland.”

  But none of those names told you anything. It was as if the jigsaw puzzle of the American West had had a piece pulled out, and the resulting blank space, a nowhere bounded within somewheres, became Area 51.

  What overwhelms is not the meaninglessness of the universe but the coexistence of an apparent meaninglessness with the astonishing interconnectedness of everything.

  The fascination Area 51 exerted, as the vanishing center of every rumored cover-up and labyrinthine conspiracy theory, was essentially the fascination of a vacancy.

  * * *

  I drove west, streaming oldies. Albuquerque toward Flagstaff. I guess I’ll never see the light, I get the blues most every night. There are plateaus in central New Mexico that look like lavender shadows from a distance, like something in a Chinese ink painting. Then you get close and see the rusts and bronzes in the rock, reddish-brown blotches like liver spots. Guardian angels up above, take care of the one I love. I stopped at the mining museum in Grants, once known as the uranium capital of the world, and rode the elevator down to the mine floor. The atom bomb was created in New Mexico in 1945, and then—but only afterward, in 1950—a Navajo shepherd named Paddy Martinez discovered the first of what would turn out to be massive concentrations of uranium there. Time goes by so slowly. Across the street from the museum stood one of the classic surviving Route 66 signs, an unlit wreck of green neon: Uranium Cafe. And time can do so much.

  That night a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Michael Flynn, was a featured guest on Fox News, where he told Megyn Kelly that Hillary Clinton’s e-mails had “likely” been hacked by the Russians. “The Russians, the Chinese … they’re good at it,” he said. Blue light sinking into the hotel TV before I fell asleep.

  * * *

  Other absences suggested themselves. In a hippie diner, the painting of a UFO over blue mountains stood angled on a shelf next to a Navajo medicine bag and a painting of a Native American warrior. Native American imagery, mythology, traditions, locations, have a way of popping up in UFO stories. Accounts of the Brown Mountain abductions in North Carolina, for instance, often mention a great battle between the Cherokee and the Catawba that happened there nine hundred years ago. The November/December 2011 issue of Atlantis Rising magazine includes a movingly preposterous study, attributed to “Arlan Andrews, Sr., Sc.D., P.E.,” of possible extraterrestrial encounters in Cherokee mythology, which is full of scenes like this:

  The Cherokee hunting party may have indeed come upon alien creatures with reptilian heads (or with hard, head-covering helmets that could look similar to a tortoise’s), dressed in pressurized suits of a shiny, reflective or radiant material that crinkled
as the creatures moved or the wind blew.

  There is a strong aesthetic appeal, for some people, in the idea that aliens and shamans open the same doors of consciousness, or that aliens are what’s behind the doors the shamans open. Months earlier, at the UFO Congress, I’d listened to a self-described former Texas Ranger explain from the lectern that if you had “the blood of colonized peoples” in you, you were especially “attractive” to what he called “the alien.” I think it had something to do with proteins? The speaker’s name was Derrel, a big square-built guy in a black sport coat, Stetson, and bolo tie. Claimed proficiency in multiple martial arts. He showed us pictures of his pet Bengal tiger, Christina, then told us Christina had perished in a “tragic flood.” Not the easiest analysis to follow. The point is that he thought Indians, along with “gypsies” and the Irish, shared some sympathetic vibration to which extraplanetary life-forms were unusually attuned. Variations on this idea were common in UFO talk.

  On Route 66, too, Native American imagery was everywhere. There were genres and subgenres of it; in the old photos, it’s haunting. Cabins in the shape of wigwams. Neon headdresses looming over motels. Arrowheads for sale. Tomahawk-brandishing “chiefs” on billboards for roadside “trading posts.” Anything that could be used to sell a pack of cigarettes to a 1950s driver. Any form of cultural iconography that could be pumped full of local-color neon.

  What was missing from these scenes? Correct: anything resembling actual Native American culture. Also anything resembling actual Native Americans.

  That’s less true in real life, of course, than in old photos. West of Seligman, Arizona, Route 66 passes through the Hualapai Indian reservation; there are casino hotels here and there along the way. Still, there’s a feeling of erasure here that’s different from what you find in, say, Massachusetts. This may be because the landscape itself holds such emptiness. There are fewer protective layers between you and American history. That is: You know that a history of invasion, displacement, and (let’s use the word) genocide permeates almost every place you go in this country. But most of the time, you are encouraged toward distraction and repression by everything around you, all the noise and glitter of contemporary culture—here’s Dunkin’ Donuts; there’s the Guggenheim Museum; is that corgi in a muumuu? Here, none of that operates. On Route 66, you are even subtly coaxed into thinking about the destruction of ancient cultures, of culture itself, by the general Ozymandias fading away of the Americana through which you’re passing.

  This started to affect the way I thought about the UFO phenomenon. I started to see it as less a problem of individual experience than one of cultural psychology. For a reference point here, think about the peculiar valence the word “alien” has in the Southwest—about what other group, besides extraplanetary visitors, it’s often applied to. Notice anything sinister there? Is it so crazy to imagine the UFO narrative as a kind of disguised psychic reckoning with the guilt-terror of white xenophobia? The kind of thing that you—millions of you; of us—can’t talk about, so you remake it as a myth? All those people, all those histories, erased; where do they go? What happens to your consciousness of them, when almost every feature of your lived reality tells you not to be conscious of them? Maybe, I thought, what happens is that you bring them back as dreams, as nightmares, surreal figures of punishment and transformation. As beings who come for you in the dark.

  * * *

  Which says nothing about what individual people experience.

  * * *

  I met a man who said owls forecast his destiny. Not in person—we spoke on the phone. People who’ve lived through what are called “high strange” paranormal events, including alien abduction, are often reluctant to get close to writers and reporters, whom they’ve learned to regard with wariness. Say you’ve experienced an abduction event; here’s what will happen. First, the media will approach you with an outward show of understanding. Your amazing story! We want to treat it with sensitivity, with taste. Then, once you’ve signed the release forms, the media will paint you as a raving crackpot. Tell me, sir, were you probed?

  Mike wasn’t shy, though. He’s a people person, a wilderness guide in the mountains, where he lives. Balding, with a warm smile and salt-and-pepper beard. He talks at the speed of thought, down a proliferating idea tree of tangents: He’ll bring up Jung’s theory of synchronicity and then describe his “mission in life” and then talk about “vocabulary words,” as in “I don’t have the right vocabulary word for what happened next.”

  There’s a beauty to his stories, though, most of which are about how, when something truly inexplicable happens, owls tend to turn up around the edges of the event. You’ll see a dozen of them on a telephone wire, and then, around the next corner, the spacecraft. Owls appear with unnerving frequency in what those who believe they’ve been abducted call screen memories, artificial recollections implanted by aliens to mask what really took place. Mike’s written a book, collecting accounts of owls in paranormal events. He thinks they might be psychic projections of extraterrestrial beings. As in cloaks that aliens wear to hide from us. The more real an owl appears, perhaps, the less likely it is to be what it seems. Perhaps many of the things that seem most vividly real to us seem so because they overlap a world of dreams. Mike described lying in the woods, looking up, feeling the silent passage of owls’ wings.

  He’d encountered so much strangeness. Not just the owls, although owls haunted his memories, but also floating orbs, glowing beings, missing time, coincidences for which the only possible explanations flirted with magic. He’d been brought onto alien ships. He’d woken in the night to find himself floating in the air. There are videos on the Internet of Mike speaking to UFO groups, something he does a fair amount of, and you have to pay close attention because he jumps so fast from one thing to the next. Now we’re having a vision of a terrifying face, now we’re in a sweat lodge with a shaman.

  He’s not crazy, that’s the thing. Much of what he says is beyond incredible, but you never doubt that there’s a reliable, if slightly high-key, consciousness on the other end. You’d trust him to get you back out of the forest. The same held for most of the UFO experiencers I met in the months before I flew to Roswell. Yes, some of them seemed nuts, and some of them were lying, and some of them were probably both, but the bulk of them? The bulk of them seemed sane. Fragile and shy and scared of attention, some of them, sure, just as you might be if you’d lived through something that ripped open your sense of reality. And the same could be said for the ones with an exaggerated sense of self-importance, of grand mission—you might think you were important, too, if you were bringing news of cosmic significance. But neither timidity nor grandiosity mean you aren’t telling the truth.

  And they weren’t being consciously untruthful. I mean, I’m speaking only about my own reactions here. Maybe I’m easily misled. Regardless, my inner sirens, most of the time, did not start wailing. There are psychological studies that bear this out. People who say they’ve been abducted by aliens tend to show PTSD-like symptoms when they’re pressed on the topic of alien abduction; otherwise, they’re not appreciably mentally ill, or not more so than the rest of us. They pay taxes and watch Hulu and decide which toothpaste to use, and then just happen to live with this one deep sinkhole of terror. (Or of wonder; I don’t know the ratios here, but there’s at least a noticeable minority of experiencers who feel they’ve been chosen, not singled out for torment.) But not trusting their honesty because they seem “strange” makes no sense, because being lifted into the sky by extraplanetary beings would of course have that effect on “normal” people. This is one of the logical switchbacks you have to navigate around UFO culture. It’s like saying, “Jake seems really on edge—he must be lying about the horrors he saw in the war.”

  What I’m saying is that there’s a legitimate mystery here, which is: Why do so many people say, and apparently believe, that they have had experiences that cannot, according to any plausible reading of reality, have happened? Stats a
re hard to come by for obvious reasons, but the number of people who say they’ve been abducted runs at least to many thousands. And yet no indisputable photographic evidence, in an era when nearly everyone carries a camera? No multiple-eyewitness accounts that aren’t at least somewhat slippery? Nothing undismissable picked up by, say, news satellites, by Google Earth? At a moment when it sometimes seems the planet is encased in a shell of surveillance? In a sense, the conspiracy-theory aspect of the UFO phenomenon, the but that’s just what they’d want you to think! side of it, was inevitable, because something had to reconcile the certainty of experiencers with the lack of ironclad evidence. The only way to do that was to suggest that the real evidence had been suppressed—that it was too important, too civilization upending, for the government not to hush it up. That way the lack of evidence could become its own kind of negative proof.

  * * *

  Here UFO believers will stop me to insist that there is evidence, mountains of it, and they’re right. There are countless reports of lights materializing over cities, of group-abductees who forgot the event, then underwent hypnosis and recovered identical memories. There are countless photographs, of varying degrees of graininess. Project Blue Book, the 1950s and ’60s U.S. Air Force study of UFO activity, really did happen; the government really did take flying saucers seriously at one time, and this is not because postwar American intelligence was so silly but because once you are tasked with mapping the line that separates folklore from reality, you discover that the line is maddeningly blurred. But all this evidence has an odd sort of vanishing-around-the-edges quality. So much of it is (even if just barely) explicable by other means. So much of it is confirming to people who are already inclined to believe and unpersuasive to people who aren’t. So much of it is on the order of “children in a small town all started drawing the same picture of a gray man with big, dark eyes” (this has happened). Which is compelling, haunting, but not quite the same as “an ocean liner appeared in the sky over Times Square.”