by Phil Patton
Bob Lazar used this mailbox as a convenient landmark to direct viewers to watch for the appearance of the craft he said flew from Dreamland. But from a mere landmark, the Black Mailbox quickly became an icon as hundreds of watchers flocked to the area hoping to catch a glimpse of saucers rising above the mountains from the Groom Lake base.
Could any symbol be handier than a mailbox? This large, classic curved-steel container, fastened with a small silver-colored padlock and puckered by the passage of .22 caliber projectiles, was a key trope of the information age, a repository for missives—some official, some personal, some commercial, the believable and the exaggerated. It was the perfect symbol of Dreamland. Of the whole black world, the black budget! It suggested blackmail and Men in Black and black helicopters.
What you could see from the Black Mailbox “was better than having sex for the first time,” Gene Huff would say. “Not for the second time, but the first.”
Huff recalled that when Bob Lazar took him out there the light from the mysterious object over the Jumbled Hills was so sudden and bright they instinctively moved behind the open trunk of the car, to shield themselves. The next Wednesday night, they returned and the disc staged an even more breathtaking performance, blinking and with each blink seeming to jump toward them.
And this was the remarkable thing, the linchpin of Lazar’s credibility: He could tell when the saucers would come. After the reports began to appear, more and more people made the pilgrimage to the Black Mailbox to enjoy the same thrill.
They saw everything from red darters to orange orbs and green glowing discs that hovered, turned suddenly, and shot away at incredible speed. They thrilled to “objects that glow with an amber light and flitted like fireflies,” to dots that “performed zigzag movement incomprehensible in terms of conventional aerodynamics.” They talked of HPACs—“human-piloted alien craft”—captured saucers, flown by humans.
Their accounts appeared on the Internet, full of a sense of menace—more in anticipation of the camou dudes than from their actual behavior. They all had the same sense of being among the first ever to see. And as a rule the farther they had traveled to get there, the more they saw.
Was it just because they had come all the way from Norway that one group worked itself into a lather of twenty or thirty sightings in one night, none of which was recorded on their videotapes? The group posted on the Internet a verbose account of their visit to the Mailbox. The account tells of dozens of saucers and a sky filled with “lazars.” I nearly jumped when I noticed this usage—was this a spell checker error or simply imperfect English? The “lazars” crisscrossed and danced across the sky in all colors—laser beams. They thought they saw fake clouds, generated by machinery, which hid the saucers from view, lenticular clouds produced by weather manipulation technology.1
… the first sightings were lights bouncing … We watched flickers, flashes, and sparks—also tremendous rapid “streaks” of light from base to cloud.… Now for the following time until 2:30 A.M. we were having continual sightings. Up to six ships at a time, appeared … We grew accustomed to the ships in such a short minimal period of time. After an hour and a half, we were “used” to them … There was no “threat” no nothing, just playful, curious encounters—goes to show HOW fast we humans can grow accustomed to things.…
I turn and there’s a beautiful “green” ship hovering … Then another one came in to the right, an orange one … [then] a green object, more Pleiadian shaped than the others we had seen … At the bottom of it, two bright lights in motion, but connected to the whole ship, all in orange colors … It vibrated and was as if it were alive … there was definitely a feeling of life & intelligence … for several minutes we were paralyzed in joy and disbelief … This particular sighting was the longest one of them all, and gave us real time to “tune in” to it, and become “acquainted” with its presence … We were feeling so relaxed about it all, didn’t seem at all strange that we were there with UFO’s, and the next thing we thought was like: “ … so, now what?”
The visiting youfers felt this was their landscape. To Sean David Morton, self-proclaimed “UFO authority” and erstwhile astrologer, predictor of earthquakes, and channeler from Hermosa Beach, California, it was the only place in the world where you could see flying saucers on a regular schedule and therefore the only place to which he could lead people for good money. Another buff, Gary Schultz, proclaimed himself “the world’s authority on Area 51.” He established a business guiding tourists on what he called “Secret Saucer Base Expeditions” and had the temerity to rename one of the mountains nearby after his girlfriend Pearl. No one else called Whitesides “Pearl’s Peak.”
Yet the citizens of Rachel, Nevada, in Lincoln County rarely saw anything at all out of the ordinary. Nor did I ever see anything that appeared not to be a flare or a helicopter or other distinct craft. Of course the ordinary included all the craft flying from Nellis, dozens of planes from the base’s Red Flag, Green Flag, and other exercises roaring over the area east of the forbidden Box.
The Interceptors wondered, Wasn’t it odd that the schedule of saucer sightings corresponded so closely to the schedule of flights from McCarran to Groom Lake? Didn’t “Old Faithful,” the UFO that appeared each Thursday morning so predictably for Morton’s customers, coincide with the schedule of the early Janet Airline flight from Las Vegas? Didn’t a lot of the green lights suggest magnesium flares dropped by fighters to decoy heat-seeking missiles or illuminate ground targets?
For the black-plane buffs, the sightings tended to be more widely dispersed, from as far away as Beale Air Force Base and Mojave in California. Supersonic planes, after all, could take the width of a good-size western state just to make a turn. The craft seen near Edwards Air Force Base in California would soon be in Nevada. Some saw hovering wings in Nevada near Pahrump, others around Goldfield. And Agent X spotted a bat-winged airplane over the town of Alamo, just up the road from Rachel. Dreamland was simply the end of a corridor that ran back to California’s aerospace center in the Antelope Valley, to Edwards and Palmdale’s factories, to which the contractors had moved from their original urban factories in Long Beach, Culver City, Burbank, and Santa Monica.
For a time, Aviation Week would report in great detail such sightings under headlines like POSSIBLE BLACK AIRCRAFT SEEN FLYING IN FORMATION WITH F-117S, KC 135S, and the details would make hearts beat faster. Some of the hearts were in the medal-encrusted chests of Air Force generals, who expressed displeasure to the editors. In any case, when correspondent Bill Scott was shifted from southern California to the magazine’s Washington bureau, such articles became fewer and notably less speculative.
Some sources for the stories described distinctive contrails—the “doughnuts on a rope” said to be characteristic of the new high-tech “pulse detonation engine,” which was a real enough technology but of unclear technical maturity.
There were sounds as well as sights: the “Aurora roar” or the “pulser sound”; “a sound like the sky ripping”; “a very, very low rumble, like air rushing through a big tube.”
The black-plane watchers and the youfers often stood side by side, looking at the same sky, seeing different things yet uttering a common cry: “Did you see that?”
The sign that warned NEXT GAS, 110 MILES was a good enough reason to stop in Rachel, up the road from the Black Mailbox. But Joe Travis and his wife, Pat, who had taken over the Rachel Bar and Grill in 1989, didn’t sell gas. They cleverly renamed the place the Little A“Le”Inn and packed it with pictures of planes and UFOs, patches of military units, saucer paintings, UFO models, and such knickknacks. They had a “stealth bomber” patch that showed—nothing. There were painted portraits of aliens by Jan Michalski, an armless Belgian who lived in Nevada. On a small shelf they established a lending library of UFO- and stealth-related books and videos. Behind the Inn stood trailers with rooms to rent, done in a style that could be called generic crime scene. The only thing missing was the chalk outline o
n the floor.
Most days, Chuck Clark was there. “Chuckie”—as the Interceptors derisively called him—saw his first UFO in August 1957, near his home, just six miles from the Skunk Works in Burbank. There was a flock of them, he told me, and he recounts how F-89s were scrambled to chase the shapes. A crowd had gathered to watch.
He came to Rachel to pursue his study of astronomy in the clear air, and his interest in secret airplanes and flying saucers was just a sideline. He had seen Aurora, he said, one cold winter night, and he talked of how the aliens might come from “another dimensional reality” or how they might be time travelers. He was calm about these possibilities, as if including them in his analyses just to be fair.
It was unfortunate, however, that when Clark grinned he turned into Howdy Doody, a grin he must have had as child, fine on a freckled boy of six but disturbing on a man of fifty, and suggesting—it wasn’t a charitable thought but it was an inevitable one—an arrested development. This, I suspect, is why the diminutive “Chuckie” managed to stick.
According to the map in the phone book, Rachel was compounded of triangles, although its street plan was not readily discernible from the first view of the trailers beside the desert, like a cove full of boats. One side of a triangle was Groom Road, the back entrance to the base. The Little A“Le”Inn anchored the north side, the rival Quik Pik the south. And at the center of the town stands a radiation recording station that measured possible fallout from the nuclear test site to the southwest, set neatly upon a little plot the way the statue of a Confederate soldier might be placed in a small (but never this small) town in South Carolina.
Civic spirit in Rachel is aptly represented by the most popular contest at the annual town fair. A checkerboard is marked off in the dust with numbered squares, and after bets have been taken, chickens are released. The object is to correctly name the square on which a chicken will first excrete.
Once the town was on its way to “site.” That is the Nevada map euphemism for ruin. (Ghost town generally indicates a “site” brought up to tourist ruin standards.) Then in 1973 Union Carbide began mining tungsten and the town, once called Sand Springs, was reconstituted, like a dried shrimp in a science kit, then renamed after the first child born under its new economy. But young Rachel Jones would die just three years later, after her family had moved on—a victim of the Mount St. Helens eruption. Place of death was recorded as Moses Lake, Washington, the site of another secret test area, used by Boeing.
The Inn was renamed after the Lazar craze began to bring UFO tourists to the town. That was Joe and Pat’s initial marketing inspiration. The rest flowed from that: the coy “Earthlings Welcome” greeting, the collections of alien masks and UFO snapshots, the menu with “Alien Burgers.” Joe let it be known that he had once worked at the base, and did not discourage the impression that the Inn was the prime watering hole for workers at Groom Lake. And Pat told eager tourists and press—the Weekly World News and later The Wall Street Journal—that she believed the place was guarded by an alien named Archibald. Behind the bar where Joe Travis always stood, beside the sign that reads THANK YOU FOR HOLDING YOUR BREATH WHILE I SMOKE, was another message to visitors: WE DON’T HAVE A TOWN IDIOT. WE ALL TAKE TURNS.
In February 1993, Joe and Pat decided to hold a conclave of UFO buffs, which they boldly titled “The Ultimate UFO Conference.” Bob Lazar arrived with a female companion, in a Corvette, and Gary Schultz spoke. Norio Hayakawa, creator of the Secrets of Dreamland videotape, played country-and-western music in a corner. It was cold and windy, but the crowd outgrew the Inn. Joe set up a large tent outside and when he was asked where he had gotten it he said, “The boys at the base lent it to me.”
At the other end of town was PsychoSpy’s trailer. Glenn Campbell, aka “the Desert Rat,” had been a computer programmer for a successful software company on Boston’s Route 128 when, in January 1993, fascinated by Lazar’s story, he moved to Rachel. The anagrammatic quality of the nickname, psy and spy, struck me as right on: This guy was different from most of the on-line characters swapping lore.
Glenn was in his activist mode that week, decrying secrecy and waste. His circulars opposing the takeover of Whitesides and Freedom Ridge proclaimed the base “a sacred temple to waste, inefficiency, incompetence, mismanagement, and maybe even fraud.” It was absurd to pretend that a huge base didn’t exist, he argued, when in fact anyone with breath enough to make it up the mountain could see it. You can’t say about a whole base “You didn’t see that” and have credibility. The government’s policy of denial was breeding mistrust; the government was alienating its own citizenry. “The stories of alien spacecraft at Area 51 cannot help but thrive,” Campbell argued.
Driving back down to Las Vegas I passed through rain and saw a double rainbow off to the east, arched from mountain to mountain. I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it myself, as the sighting reports say.
At home much later, when I listened to my tape recording from my time on the Ridge, what came through was the noise of the wind, hissing, flickering, licking. Much noise, little signal. Or was the noise itself the signal?
3. “They’re Here!”
In 1989, what seemed a clear signal emerged at last from the noise around Dreamland. Bob Lazar claimed to have worked on flying saucers hidden near Groom Lake. The gawky technician’s story grabbed the attention of not just wide-eyed saucer buffs but a wider audience of the curious. Some believed he was telling the absolute truth; others were intrigued by the belief that he could be telling the truth. Bob Lazar brought to the borders of Dreamland people who had never heard of the Skunk Works.
In person, or on radio or television, the unassuming Lazar broadcast a believability that grew from his lack of stridency. Calm, almost diffident, he worked a charm that fascinated even those it did not convince. Tom Mahood, a hardly credulous engineer, who researched many of Lazar’s claims and found holes in the story of his life, never lost the sense of how subliminally persuasive the man was. His matter-of-factness lent possibility to a story that rendered in cold print seemed outlandish and weird.
In essence, that story went like this:
I saw flying saucers in Dreamland. I worked on flying saucers owned by our government in an area called S-4, at Papoose Lake, south of Groom Lake. I thought I was going to work at Area 51 but was taken in a bus with blacked-out windows to a place where I saw the saucers.
I learned of antimatter reactors used to bend gravity waves fueled by element 115, a reddish orange substance, of which we have about 500 pounds and which comes in discs the shape of half dollars. I had one but the government stole it back.
I saw golf balls bounced off the gravity wave the reactor from the saucer generated. I was allowed to read strange documents—autopsy images of aliens, and a history of the earth as viewed from Zeta Reticuli where the aliens came from.
I saw my fellow workers wearing security badges with one light blue diagonal stripe and one dark blue and the letters MJ. My supervisor had one that read “Majestic.”
I saw little chairs in the saucers that suggested little creatures—aliens.
Once I walked by hangars and caught glimpses of—I think—a little alien. But I’m not sure. “It could have been a million things,” [the supervisor] said. But I think I saw one.
It began with a chance encounter with Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb and godfather of Star Wars. Lazar had been working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, for a contractor to the physics labs there called Kirk-Mayer. His job involved particle detection equipment—Geiger counter stuff—and was linked to the Meson or Positive Proton Lab. Locals remembered him as intelligent, kind but a bit of a con man, trying to rustle tools and funds for another project.
In his spare time Lazar had designed a “jet car,” a weird mating of a Honda CRX and a jet engine. The local paper, the Los Alamos Monitor, had done a story about Lazar and his car, right there on the front page, and on June 23, 1982, the day after the story appeared, Lazar went to a lect
ure Teller was giving in town. Before the lecture, he spotted Teller reading the Monitor. “That’s me you’re reading about,” Lazar told him, and chatted him up.
Several years later, after his marriage had dissolved and his finances gone to rack and ruin, after he had been let go by the contractor in Los Alamos for using government equipment to work on the jet car, Lazar wrote to Teller seeking work. He had moved to Las Vegas in April 1986, in an attempt to start again. On April 19, he married a woman named Tracy Anne Murk at the We’ve Only Just Begun wedding chapel of the Imperial Hotel. Two days later, his first wife committed suicide, inhaling carbon monoxide in their garage. In October he declared bankruptcy. With the bankruptcy and new marriage, Lazar had begun to put the past behind him, to repair his life and his self-image. Teller would direct him to the people who hired him as what Agent X would later call “the Mr. Goodwrench of flying saucers.”
Teller called, saying he didn’t have any jobs for physicists but knew someone who might. Fifteen minutes later Lazar’s phone rang again. It was someone from EG&G, inviting him for an interview that led to the job at S-4.
Lazar would brag that at the interview he had “dazzled” them. Who were they? EG&G hired him, but his ultimate employer, he said, was listed as the Office of Naval Intelligence. Lazar was able to produce a W-2 form bearing a payer ID number assigned to the Navy; it recorded an annual earning of $977.11.
In December 1988, Lazar said, he began work at S-4, which was ten or twelve miles from Area 51.
Bob Lazar liked to feature himself as physicist, and in his most widely circulated photograph he presented himself, chalk in hand, in front of a blackboard covered with abstruse equations, like Oppenheimer or Teller. He claimed attendance at MIT and CalTech and said he had two master’s degrees. He talked of “getting back into physics,” as if he had been a major lab scientist, and referred to Edward Teller as “Ed.” But he was not a physicist in any professional sense. He had made his living as a technician and later as the owner and operator of a fast-photo processing outlet.