* * *
The problem this creates is analogous to the problem of religious experience; it’s fascinating and disturbing in the same way. What do you do when someone whose word you have no reason to doubt claims to have seen God? When you yourself haven’t? Either your sense of reality expands around that possibility or it doesn’t. A big difference between religious faith and the belief that aliens walk among us, of course, is that God is often thought to occupy what we might crudely call a higher order of reality, while aliens presumably exist within ours. (Another difference is that the experience of religious visitation leaves most people overjoyed; you don’t get a lot of PTSD from it, although it blows your perceptions wide open.) Still, the abduction narrative has many features in common with, say, the writings of mystic saints—the blinding light overhead, the sense of telepathic communion, the slow floating upward. You don’t have to look hard for theories that the “angels” described by ancient writers were actually beings from space—or, on the other hand, that the aliens described by experiencers are the atomic-age equivalent of fairies.
Paranoia is skepticism taken to the point where it becomes faith. In the same way, the UFO narrative takes twentieth-century scientism to the point where it becomes mystical. I mean that in all transparency: It takes the aesthetic paraphernalia of mid-century science (advanced aircraft, faster-than-light travel, gleaming labs, silvery fabrics, shiny implements) and uses them to clothe a story whose whole underlying structure is religious (superior beings watching from above, secret truths revealed only to a few, problems of faith and proof, and so on). Which, again, says nothing about whether people have actually experienced it. Remember how I said that Area 51 was both there and not there at the same time? Spend enough time with these questions and you end up feeling like Augustine, who wrote of God and heavenly creatures that “they neither are nor are not in existence.”
Or almost. Looking back at the Confessions, I realize I have that Augustine line backward. It’s God, in Augustine’s formulation, who is entirely in existence. (Of course it is.) It’s what isn’t God—our world, our rooms, our memories, our faces—that is both there and also not. It’s real, because it comes from God, and not real, because it isn’t God. What’s real and also not? A dream, right? Augustine isn’t saying that God is like a dream we’re having. He’s saying the opposite. He’s saying we’re the dream.
* * *
In western New Mexico, on the edge of the Zuni Mountains, there’s a place called Inscription Rock. It’s a pale sandstone cliff rising out of the desert. Bleached-looking bluffs. A kind of rough-hewn natural fortress, towering two hundred feet over low tangles of juniper and ponderosa pine. The conquistadors called it El Morro: “the promontory.” (Or else: “the nose.”) Walk around the base and you find a fold in the cliff that makes a small, shaded grotto where rainwater gathers in a pool.
Just rainwater—there’s no underground spring or anything like that. But for hundreds of years, if you wanted to cross this desert and survive, the pool was your best hope. Going back to the Spanish, even before. Even a long time before. The little rain basin at El Morro was the vital link for generation upon generation of travelers.
The oldest carvings on the rock are ancient petroglyphs, made by Native Puebloans around a thousand years ago. Pale handprints. Bighorn sheep. Human forms with box-shaped torsos. Over the centuries, as the land was colonized by successive waves of explorers and then missionaries and soldiers and settlers, a sort of ad hoc traveler’s custom arose whereby those who passed through would etch their names into the stone. Not like a formal tradition. Just, one person did it, then the next person saw that inscription and copied it. Many of them wrote a little bit about their journeys. The first message from a European was carved in 1605. That’s fifteen years before the Mayflower landed.
There are two thousand carvings. Some are crudely scraped, some chiseled with a finesse that’s nearly calligraphic. After the petroglyphs, the oldest belong to Spaniards, whose messages are small windows onto the moment when breast-plated and shiny-helmeted conquistadors ventured into this unimaginable (to them) desert vastness. Paso por aqi el adelantado Don Ju de Oñate del descubrimyento de la mar del sur a 16 de Abril de 1605. Governor Don Juan de Oñate passed through here after the discovery of the Sea of the South on the 16th of April of 1605. The Sea of the South—that’s the Pacific Ocean. Oñate didn’t discover it for Spain (Balboa had done that); he was looking for an outlet. They knew it was there, but not how to find it. This was the era of lost cities of gold, of Terra Australis. The map of the world was still full of blanks. To survive on the way back to New Mexico, Oñate’s men had to eat their horses.
So right away, as you stroll the path beside the cliff’s base, you’re looking back in time. At crueler histories, too: Oñate’s brutality to the Native Americans he encountered was so extreme that he was eventually put on trial for it, not an easy achievement for a colonial governor in Nuevo México. He “dealt harshly” with “rebellious” Indians, is how old history books put it. Newer ones say he cut off the feet of captives from tribes he wanted to subdue. (In the eyes of the king, his real crime was probably running out of money.) Another inscription, from 1632, tells of the passing of a group of soldiers on their way to “avenge the death of Father Letrado,” a missionary who’d been killed and scalped by the Zuni. In 1680, the Pueblo rose up against Spanish oppression and drove out the colonists; twelve years later, Diego de Vargas arrived with a military force and reconquered Santa Fe. “Here was the General Don Diego de Vargas, who conquered for our Holy Faith and for the Royal Crown all of New Mexico at his own expense, year of 1692,” his carved inscription reads. At his own expense—what a glimpse of character in that one tiny flourish.
The Indian Wars are written all over this place. Cavalrymen sent by the U.S. government to secure the Southwest passed through before the first Southern state seceded. When he was secretary of war for the United States, Jefferson Davis had formed an experimental camel corps, had sent American troops with dozens of camels into the desert; one of these contingents passed through here in 1857. P. Gilmer Breckinridge, who oversaw twenty-five camels, signed his name on the rock. The next year saw settlers bound for California. One member of the group who carved her name was twelve-year-old Sallie Fox, traveling west with her family. After they moved on from El Morro, their wagon train was attacked by Mojave Indians. Sallie was shot through the rib cage with an arrow. She endured the long desert trek, mostly on foot and with a high fever, back to Albuquerque with the survivors from her party. The dress she was wearing is now in the historical museum in Vacaville, California. There’s a little rent in the right side of the chest, where the arrow went through.
Among the inscriptions, there are countless hidden stories, countless mysteries. That Oñate message, for instance—did he carve it over a petroglyph, expressing contempt for the Indians? Or did the Pueblo carve the image, a human figure, over his words, expressing defiance against a sadistic enemy? It would be fascinating to know, but we never will, because it’s difficult to date the glyphs, and also because the inscriptions themselves are vanishing. The sandstone is so soft. That’s what made the carvings possible in the first place; it also means that every day, the wind lifts away a little more. Already many of the inscriptions are hard to read. The National Park Service is trying to preserve them; at best, the disappearance can be slowed.
* * *
A park ranger warned me that it was “breezy,” but I wanted to see the top, so I followed the thin track up along the promontory’s side and then stepped out onto the rock. The wind was cold. Erosion had left weird, cowboy-dimension shapes in the summit’s profile. Shattered-looking steeples. Long protuberances that called to mind fierce masks. The gusts were hard enough at times that I had to hunch down to keep my balance. To my left, the cliff’s edge fell away, and the view spread out for miles. At the horizon, a low ridge lay along the sky like a sea monster’s surfacing back.
Make your way far
enough out onto the bluff and you come to a ruin. There was a village here, established more than seven hundred years ago by Ancestral Puebloans. Most scholars no longer refer to them by the pejorative term the Navajo used, Anasazi, meaning “ancient enemies” or “ancient strangers.” Little is known about them. They were responsible for many of the petroglyphs; the Zuni who found the site much later called it Atsinna, “place of writings on the rock.” Little of the village remains: a small grid of recessed stone walls, a larger room that might have been used for religious ceremonies.
The civilization of the people who built this place leaves a baffling trail in the historic record. If you look at the evidence from a certain angle, they seem, all of a sudden, to disappear. This would have happened centuries before even the Spanish arrived. For many years, what became of them was one of the great unanswered questions in American archaeology. It’s now generally accepted that they migrated to the southwest, to areas with more reliable sources of water, where they merged with other Puebloan cultures. Which makes sense. Still, there’s an air of mystery around them, and standing on the rock by the ruins of their pueblo, I couldn’t help remembering a theory I’d heard repeatedly from UFO aficionados. The theory said that they vanished because they were taken away by aliens, or else because they were aliens—ancient strangers, traveling some long-forgotten road back to the stars.
* * *
I drove for two more days. If I could take you up in paradise up above. West through Arizona, then north, into Nevada. The Black Canyon looked like nothing I’d seen in this world. If you had to dream up a lost kingdom for a fantasy novel, that’s the sort of landscape you might invent. I spent a night in a Navajo casino. The next night I spent in Las Vegas, where I walked around for hours, lost in my own head (when would I stop lying to everyone, when would I stop lying to myself?), until the colors started to carousel.
Donald Trump’s face flashing across the Bellagio TVs. Life could be a dream, sweetheart.
* * *
To get to Area 51 from Las Vegas, you take U.S. 93 north for ninety or so miles, then exit onto Nevada State Route 375, the so-called Extraterrestrial Highway—the state renamed it in 1996, during promotion for Independence Day—and follow that for an hour into increasingly remote desert. You’re driving along the northern edge of Nellis Air Force Base, part of that vast reserve of military land, but there’s no indication of that, no signage, hardly any other traffic. Eventually, you come to Rachel, population approximately fifty, where there’s an alien-themed motel (the Little A’Le’Inn) and not much else. I had lunch at the motel restaurant, a greasy spoon full of alien-themed bric-a-brac. No one else was in the place except a couple of Australians, one of whom was bellowingly drunk and wearing a tinfoil Viking helmet. He’d obviously crafted it himself, from his lunch wrappings. He kept shouting about how “radical” everything here was. The woman behind the counter sighed as she pressed my burger patty down on the griddle.
The roads get smaller as you close in. First you’re on a highway, then you’re on gravel. Then dirt. The desert here is riddled with Joshua trees. Have you seen them? Twisted, long-limbed evergreens that put Mormon settlers in mind of the prophet Joshua, arms flung up in prayer. This is, incongruously, free-range cattle country—everyone rushed to warn me about that, local people I mean, when I said I was going to Area 51; nothing at all about men in black, but be careful, the bulls will charge your car—and every few hundred yards there’d be a little clutch of them, lying in the brush under the Joshua trees. As if they’d built nests.
The song that came on, as I drove among the cow nests and the contorted trees, was “Maybe” by the Chantels. So I drove for a while and listened to that. Maybe if I pray every night, you’ll come back to me. I passed the skeleton of a horse, lying on its side in the dust. Maybe if I hold your hand, you will understand. I don’t think I’ve ever felt, in the continental United States, so far away from everything.
Then “Maybe” ended, and “Papa Loves Mambo” came on. I wish, for the sake of atmosphere, that I could report otherwise, but it was “Papa Loves Mambo” that was playing as I came into view of Area 51.
There were tourists at the gate. A minivan full of them. In retrospect, that seems inevitable, but at the time I think it was the most surprising thing I could possibly have seen. They’d gotten out and were snapping away with their phones. I stopped the Sentra thirty yards or so behind them, so taken aback that it took me a minute to realize that what I’d read on the Internet was true. Some way back from the gate, there was a sort of rise in the landscape, not quite a hill, but an undulation high enough to give a view of the immediate surroundings. A white truck was parked up there. It didn’t move, didn’t offer an inkling of life. Just sat there, looking sinister. Mama loves mambo.
I keep saying “gate,” but there wasn’t a gate. Just two warning signs, one on either side of the road, nothing to keep you from driving right past them. Except that the signs say, basically, Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. They say it in crisp military English, Entry is unlawful without written permission from etc. The tourists went right up to the signs to take selfies but did not, I noticed, step beyond them.
The whole thing seemed vaguely ridiculous. But then, dreams often are. Here I was, on the threshold of Dreamland. Anyway, what could I do? I’d come here. Now I was here. The minivan drove away and I pulled forward. Beyond the signs, there was nothing. More desert. I walked up to the line and looked over. After days of strange profusion, it was almost a relief to see something so inaccessible to knowledge, such a complete refusal to be anything but an absence. The thought I had was that I had finally reached the frontier, that when we ran out of west in America we locked the idea of it away in places like this, blanks on the map that could never be charted, behind borders we could approach but never cross. Where who knows what monsters might exist. And sure, I thought about flying saucers. But mostly I thought about nothing, about the not-answer that lay beneath even my ability to ask questions. I remembered the sign I’d seen by the giant jackrabbit: HERE IT IS.
And I remembered how, hundreds of miles away and in a different desert, what was left of Route 66 still ran westward, from Arizona into California and across the Mojave to Los Angeles, to the place where it ended at the Santa Monica Pier, by the Ferris wheel on the edge of the sea.
* * *
There was one more place I needed to visit, but getting there took some time. After I got back from Area 51, I flew to Paris and went completely to pieces, which I am telling you not to sound exotic but simply because it is what happened. After that, things got better, but they got better slowly, and in the interim I moved across the country and the website I was working for collapsed. So it was not until the following winter that I managed to contact the army and ask for permission to visit the Trinity site. They said yes, don’t ask me why. It’s where the first atom bomb was detonated. Three weeks later, the second, Little Boy, exploded over Hiroshima. The site is open to visitors two days a year, in April and October, that’s it, and I’d missed both days. But the army liaison, Lisa, took pity on me and agreed to drive me out. I went in early February; it was the week of the Iowa presidential caucuses.
Trinity is a hundred miles or so south of Route 66. It’s inside the White Sands Missile Range, in southern New Mexico. Another gargantuan expanse of military land, larger than Delaware, so huge that driving across it kills a workday. On the northern side, which is closest to Trinity, the nearest town is San Antonio, New Mexico. There’s a restaurant there, the Owl Bar and Cafe, that opened in 1945. Manhattan Project scientists used to drink there in their off-hours; I stopped in for lunch. On the sign outside, the owl’s painted wings looked like flames.
White Sands is mostly empty terrain. On the drive out to Trinity, I noticed military road signs depicting animals I didn’t recognize, black silhouettes inside yellow diamonds, horselike heads with long, spiral-turned, gently arcing horns. Lisa told me that in the 1960s, the base commanders had imported twe
nty-five hundred oryx from the Kalahari in order to stage exotic game hunts. Since the oryx’s major predator is the lion, and since, as Lisa pointed out, “we don’t get too many lions in New Mexico,” the herd had thrived such that there was now a basically self-supporting population of wild African antelopes contained entirely within the largest missile-test zone of the American military apparatus. Just: right there. No distance at all from the place where the atomic age was born.
On the drive back, I saw them. Marvelous creatures. Like stout horses, but with startling black-and-white face masks and the tall V of the horns, which seemed to belong to different animals entirely, more ethereal but also more demonic. The herd was set back from the road, just grazing. There were many oryx. I was in a distracted state from having seen Trinity and from having stood, alone except for Lisa, on the spot where, on the morning of July 16, 1945, the first mushroom cloud had risen over the desert, an explosion of such power it shattered windows 150 miles away. The ground there glitters with green rocks called trinitite, created when quantities of sand from beneath the bomb tower were sucked up into the blast and vaporized. When they came down to earth they recrystallized into a radioactive substance scientists still don’t fully understand. Green flakes of it appear around the many small holes that dot the site. I wondered if the holes were related to the bomb, but Lisa said no, they were rabbit holes, rabbits have reclaimed the land around ground zero.
Impossible Owls Page 11