Dreamland

by Phil Patton

  After reading Jung, I became more aware of patterns in the tales surrounding Dreamland. Like UFOs, the actual existence of the flying black triangles (or bats or rays or pumpkin seeds) was a matter of serious debate. The black-plane stories shared a consistency of account and rough detail that made up a corpus of experience. I came to think of it collectively as the Lore.

  Today’s folklore, or the nearest thing we have to it, is bounded by technical expertise and collective fascination. It lives in a group’s language, assumptions, and perspective, in its prides and prejudices. Technical subcultures—sharers of belief in a technology—are paralleled by those with a faith in conspiracy, a hidden order. Could it not be that in an age of technological explanation it took the unexplained to link us together? That in the age of information, it took mystery? Shared professions and shared fascinations had replaced the shared geography of village or town. Sometimes the cultures of technology could seem like cults, and the mechanics of conspiracy theory could seem as complex as science or engineering.

  Both saucers and mystery planes had about them the same compulsive gathering of bits of information, the careful construction of databases of sightings, dimensions, aircraft specifications, and numbers. In this regard, both groups resembled the historian Richard Hofstadter’s descriptions of conspiracy groups who from time immemorial have built elaborate factual structures from which to launch speculations.

  John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists saw the same sort of dynamic Carl Jung had observed among flying saucer buffs at work in the sightings of black aircraft. “Considered as a sociological and epistemological phenomenon, the parallels between reports of flying saucers and reports of mystery aircraft are striking,” he wrote. If, as Jung believed, flying saucers “were a response to the deep cultural anxieties of a society threatened with sudden nuclear annihilation,” then couldn’t mystery aircraft be a response to economic challenges and the decline in fortunes of the aerospace industry, whose future the end of the Cold War had made uncertain?

  “Belief in the existence of marvelously capable and highly secret aircraft resonates with some of the deeper anxieties of contemporary American society,” Pike went on. “Aviation has long been one of the distinguishing attributes of American greatness, from Kitty Hawk to Desert Storm.

  “It would be reassuring to believe that concealed in the most hidden recesses of the American technostructure were devices of such miraculous capabilities that they will astound the world when at last they are revealed and will restore America to its rightful station of leadership.”

  The saucers might save us from the Cold War; the black aircraft could save us from its aftermath.

  9. Ike’s Toothache

  Not long before the Saucerian convention at Giant Rock, the president of the United States came to nearby Palm Springs to relax. He had made the eight-hour flight out to California on his Lockheed Constellation, named the Columbine after a wildflower he loved from his prairie childhood. On Saturday, February 20, 1954, Dwight D. Eisenhower was enjoying a golfing vacation at Smoke Tree Ranch as the guest of golf partners Paul G. Hoffman, chairman of the Studebaker Corporation, George Allen, an insurance CEO, and Paul Helms, president of the Helms Baking Company. He rose early, met the press at eight-thirty to announce he had signed twenty-three bills, and made comments supporting his nominee for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren. He spent the day playing golf. But that evening, after dinner, Ike disappeared.

  One can easily imagine the press corps, happy for some time out of the Washington winter, sitting around their Saturday night card game in the nearby Mirador Hotel and getting irked when Eisenhower did not return from dinner as scheduled. Could he have had a heart attack? Was a world crisis brewing? What one correspondent would call “journalistic mob hysteria” seized the press when Merriman Smith of the U.P. dispatched an alarming report that the president had been taken away for “medical treatment.” The rival A.P. took it another step: The president was dead, it declared in a hastily retracted bulletin.

  James Haggerty, the press secretary, was called out to make an explanatory statement. The wild rumors were quickly put to rest. “During [the president’s] evening meal, the porcelain cap on one of his front teeth chipped off,” The New York Times reported. “Mr. Helms took him to Dr. F. A. Purcell, a dentist, who replaced the cap. When the president goes to church tomorrow morning, his grin will look the same as ever.”

  The reporters grumbled about a toothache being turned into an international crisis, but during the hours of Eisenhower’s absence, a legend was born: The Lore would record that he was secretly flown to Muroc, soon to be Edwards Air Force Base, to meet with aliens and view recovered flying saucers. Eisenhower’s dental mishap, like the crumb of cheese that grows into Scrooge’s nightmares, would grow into a whole fabric of conspiracy theories that will eventually end up in Dreamland.

  The next morning Eisenhower took his wife and mother-in-law to the Palm Springs Community Church, his repaired grin inspiring crowds to political-rally warmth. In the sanctuary, the minister praised Ike and Mamie’s spiritual example, their witness to Christian principles and religious conviction. One aspect of his religiosity was that Ike did not play golf on Sundays.

  Had Ike made that trip, met those aliens, could the grin indeed have looked the same as ever? It must have been a moment of profound philosophical reexamination for the former general. According to one account, the aliens “kept disappearing, causing him embarrassment.” Did he wonder where to focus his attentive gaze, his welcoming remarks? Could this man have indeed disappeared between dinner and breakfast to view hidden saucers and meet with aliens and then sailed off to listen happily to that sermon?

  The idea of a trip to Muroc is hard to buy. The president would have had to fly to leave himself any significant amount of time at the base. He would have lost a lot of sleep.

  The legend of “Ike’s toothache” was established in UFO lore as a result of a letter written in April 1954 by Gerald Light to Meade Layne. No one has much of an idea who Light was, beyond the fact that he was an adherent of a spiritualist organization called the Borderlands Foundation, founded in 1945 by Layne to explore “realms normally beyond the range of basic human perception and physical measurement.” Publishing works by Charles Steinmetz and The Etheric Formative Forces in Cosmos, Earth and Man by Dr. Guenther Wachsmuth, Borderlands was dedicated to investigations of “ether ships,” Vril energy, radionics, and dowsing. It stood somewhere between the Theosophist groups then influential in Los Angeles and today’s New Age groups. Layne himself had written on the saucers, which he called “ether ships” or “aeroforms,” tying them to the Kabala and other mystical writings.

  Light’s letter has become a classic of the Lore, a record of suspicion emerging from enthusiasm, excitement mingling with dread.

  My Dear Friend—

  I have just returned from Muroc. The report is true—devastatingly true!

  I made the journey in company with Franklin Allen of the Hearst papers and Edwin Nourse of Brookings Institute and Bishop MacIntyre of LA (confidential names, for the present, please).

  When we were allowed to enter the restricted section (after about six hours in which we were checked on every possible item, event, incident, and aspect of our personal and public lives), I had the distinct feeling that the world had come to an end with fantastic realism. For I have never seen so many human beings in a state of complete collapse and confusion as they realized that their own world had indeed ended with such finality as to beggar description. The reality of “otherplane” aeroforms is now and forever removed from the realms of speculation and made a rather painful part of the consciousness of every responsible scientific and political group.

  During his two-day visit, Light went on, he saw five different types of aircraft “with the assistance and permission of the Etherians.”

  The notion that he would have been included with such well-known figures as the Hearst columnist and the bis
hop is self-congratulatory, and the tone is a strange combination of sermonly seriousness and offhand weirdness:

  President Eisenhower, as you may already know, was spirited over to Muroc one night during his visit to Palm Springs recently.

  Mental and emotional pandemonium is now shattering the consciousness of hundreds of our scientific “authorities.”

  “Pity” was what he felt watching “the pathetic bewilderment of rather brilliant brains struggling to make some sort of rational explanation.” For himself, he said, he had long ago entered “the metaphysical woods.”

  I had forgotten how commonplace such things as the dematerialization of “solid” objects had become to my own mind. The coming and going of an etheric, or spirit, body has been so familiar to me these many years I had just forgotten that such a manifestation could snap the mental balance of a man not so conditioned.

  Light’s letter reads like the most clever sort of propagandist document—one whose real message is oblique. While designed to be read by someone outside, it speaks as an insider: Light would not have to define “etheric” for his pal Meade Layne (a name smarmy enough for a character from a Chandler novel). He drops the names of his companions (an unlikely bunch) and describes a thoroughgoing background check that only someone unfamiliar with the military could imagine. Such signs mark his letter as an effort to shift the discussion of flying saucers into the territory of the Borderlands and other spiritualist groups. The flying objects were not from Mars or Zeta Reticuli but from a “higher plane,” “a different dimension.”

  The leaps of speculation implicit in references to Eisenhower’s “secret trip” slip in almost unnoticed. Thus uncertainty or secrecy mutates into fantasy: If the president catches cold, the stock market may get pneumonia; if the president has a heart attack, the whole Cold War balance trembles. When the president got a chipped tooth, in this year of maximum danger, consternation ensued. From a tiny chip, a crevasse of speculation could grow.

  But it was too late for the conspiracists to be disarmed. The first few months after their advent in 1947 was probably the last time that an air of open-mindedness about flying saucers was sustained. The lines of opposition had not yet hardened between private researchers and government. The Air Force, just established as an independent service, had not grown disgusted with the question. Fear had not yet overwhelmed curiosity. A variety of ideas were in play, and speculation was neither stifled nor rampant. Theories of government cover-up had yet to take root. The question, in short, was still open.

  On September 23, Gen. Nathan Twining, commanding general of the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, wrote a secret memo to Brig. Gen. George Schulgen, chief of the Air Intelligence Requirements Division at the Pentagon, about the flying saucer question.

  Twining’s memo offered what seems a reasonable and open-minded listing of possible explanations for the UFOs: They are a secret U.S. craft, or a secret Soviet system, perhaps developed with the aid of German scientists (shades of future theories). They are an unexplained meteorological or atmospheric phenomenon, or—and this was not ruled out—craft from another star system. Indeed, he added, “It is the considered opinion of some elements that the object may in fact represent an interplanetary craft of some kind.

  “The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious,” Twining concluded, in words that would be cited again and again. There was recommendation for further study and a suggestion, later explicitly rejected for reasons of cost, that interceptor fighters be kept on alert to shoot down UFOs.

  In December 1947, the Air Force set up Project Sign to track the saucers and other UFOs and determine their nature. But in 1949 the name was changed to Project Grudge, an unconscious symbol that the attitude of the Air Force had quickly turned to irritation. It hated dealing with the UFO problem, the press, the watchers, the nuts. It was uncomfortable with the notion that objects might be able to fly so easily through its air defenses. It felt disarmed dealing in areas where hard evidence was hard to get. Most of all, it wanted to be rid of the problem. The Air Force, a joke had it, wished the saucers swam instead of flew so that they would become the Navy’s problem.

  In 1948, a report of Project Sign, called “Estimate of the Situation,” was completed. Neither chief of staff Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg nor Twining found it acceptable. Deciding that the evidence did not support the conclusions, Vandenberg ordered it destroyed, and the “Estimate” was not made public. Years later, when UFO researchers asked for a copy, neither the military nor the civilian agencies could or were willing to provide one. This lapse would be cited in support of the argument that there was a cover-up. Quotations ostensibly from the never-issued document made reference to descriptions of material that sounded a lot like the Roswell wreckage, which believers saw as proof that the Roswell recovery had been part of a cover-up, that the stuff was indeed pieces of a saucer, and that Air Force units were being asked to be on the alert for similar incidents and objects. The cries of cover-up would soon be a dominant note in the debate over UFOs. In January 1950, True magazine published the famous Donald Keyhoe story that charged the government with a cover-up of the truth about the saucers. “Estimate of the Situation” would become legendary and leave a legacy of suspicion.

  Keyhoe published a book-length argument, The Flying Saucers Are Real, in 1950 and soon began to speak of “silencers,” Air Force officers or other government agents intimidating witnesses to keep the truth secret. He followed up with The Flying Saucer Conspiracy in 1955.

  The strand of the Lore charging cover-up and conspiracy spun off from that of the happy contactees almost immediately. An early and recurrent part of it were the “Men in Black.” Here one could clearly see folklore crystallizing from real events.

  It began with a plane crash, like a science fiction film I remembered from childhood—was it Target Earth? A B-26 crashes, and marks in the dirt indicate the movement of an invisible creature. Suddenly, a dead aviator shudders back to life and begins a zombielike walk—a military man possessed by an alien force.

  In July 1947, Fred Lee Crisman and Harold A. Dahl, two men from Tacoma, Washington, who claimed to be harbor patrolmen, reported that they had seen a group of doughnut-shaped UFOs near Maury Island and had gathered scraps of one that had crashed. There were intriguing details: Their radio was jammed and strange spots appeared on photographs they took. And a mysterious man in black drove up in a black Buick and told them to keep quiet.

  The Air Force dispatched its top flying saucer investigators, Lt. Frank Brown and Capt. William Davidson from the TID—Technical Intelligence Division. They determined that the whole story was a hoax. But when their B-25 bomber crashed on their return home, suspicions immediately arose that someone was hushing things up. The Tacoma newspaper headlined the story SABOTAGE SUSPECTED.

  A book by Gray Barker called They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers was published in 1956 and established the Men in Black legend firmly in the Lore. In 1952, Barker claimed, a man named Albert K. Bender organized a UFO group called the International Flying Saucer Bureau. Within months, Bender was visited by MiBs who told him that the government knew and would soon reveal the truth. They persuaded him to dissolve his organization.

  In just a few years, the Men in Black story took on detail and showed all the mutability of a traditional folktale. The Tacoma Buick was upgraded in many versions to a black Cadillac. These Men in Black often dressed too warmly; they walked and talked mechanically; they had vaguely Asian features. They could have been aliens themselves, even robots. To folklorist Peter M. Rojcewicz, they suggested the ominous dark men or evil tricksters found in many folk traditions.

  The story took a new twist in 1980 when Lowell Cunningham, hearing of the legend in casual conversation, was inspired to create a humorous comic-book version of the tale. It underwent a further twist when the comic book became the basis for a screenplay and, in 1997, a hit film, Men in Black.

  Neither Cunningham nor Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed the
film, had heard of Crisman and Dahl or Gray Barker or any of the origins of the MiB myth. Knowing it only as an urban legend, they felt free to extemporize on it and the film provided a darkly comic rendition of what had begun as sinister. The film was another play on the alien immigrant/alien life-form pun, and the cinematic Men in Black were urbanized agents belonging to a sort of intergalactic Immigration and Naturalization Service. They provided the great service of keeping us safe and happy in our ignorance of the alien presence.1

  The camou dudes at Area 51 were in some sense imaginative relatives of the Men in Black. Their danger was overestimated; they took on an almost folkloric quality of menace. Sometimes they inhabited the dreams of watchers, like modern-day Greek Furies. So when Gene Huff talked about his feelings of fear and guilt after visiting the perimeter with Lazar, he talked about “the Dream Police”—police in his mind. The camou dudes, like the mysteries of Area 51 itself, came at the end of a long tradition—a legacy of fear. They were shadows of very old figures of menace, just as the mysteries of Area 51 itself touched almost primal fears of the unknown.

  10. Paradise Ranch

  For Curtis LeMay, 1954 was the year of “maximum danger,” the year he believed the Soviets would have more than enough bombs and bombers to hit us and we wouldn’t yet have enough of the silver bombers he thought the United States needed to strike back. For the country at large, it was a year of fear—the depth of Cold War paranoia, the high-water mark of McCarthyism. The greatest fear was of surprise attack, an atomic Pearl Harbor. President Eisenhower feared a surprise attack too, a lack of intelligence like the one that had nearly cost him his reputation at the Battle of the Bulge. If LeMay had seemed eager to start World War III, there were others in 1954 who began creating an airplane that could prevent it.