Dreamland

by Phil Patton

  What drew them most, however, was the huge base built almost overnight in the middle of a test range previously dedicated mostly to radar and electronics.

  One day in 1984, Col. Robert “Burner Bob” Jackson was reading The Wall Street Journal when a small advertisement caught his eye. The Chevron petroleum company had secondhand oil patch trailers to sell. Jackson bought the trailers for $10 million; he was about to move the Stealth fighter group from Groom Lake to Tonopah.

  The trailers ended up on the raw site south of the old Tonopah Air Field, where mustangs roamed the runways and scorpions crept into buildings. Fences and searchlights went up along the edge of the new base, and video cameras and motion sensors were installed. Eventually the Air Force spent $300 million and fitted the place out with a gym and indoor pool.

  The activity did not go unnoticed. A-7s were kept parked outside, as Soviet satellite passes overhead increased to three and four a day. The A-7s were part of a cover story; they carried old napalm canisters painted black and decorated with flashing red lights and lettering that read REACTOR COOLING FILL PORT. The idea was to spread the information that these were an “atomic anti-radar system.” Ground crews were forced to lie spread-eagle and not look at the craft as they passed. The lie must be made as hard to get at as the truth.

  In the fall of 1988, the Air Force released the first, heavily doctored photograph of the fighter. It was so vague and the angle so misleading that some pilots doubled over in laughter when they saw it.

  But soon the airplane buffs found out about Tonopah and the fence. By the winter of 1988, some were getting glimpses, even snapshots, that showed the strange flat shape from the bottom, the angular diamond, faceted and crimped.

  Byron Augenbaugh, a schoolteacher and airplane buff from Escondido, California, drove up to Tonopah one day in the spring of 1989. At a gas station he asked where he should go to see the Stealth fighter. “Just look up,” the attendant told him, and sure enough one flew over. Augenbaugh snapped a picture. On May 1, 1989, Aviation Week ran a cover shot of the fighter so fuzzy that one of the magazine’s editors said “it looked like a French Impressionist painting.”

  There was something lascivious about such images. In the first pictures of the Stealth fighter the Air Force would release, the inlets for the engines were airbrushed out, like the flaws in a Playboy centerfold model. Around the same time the Air Force chief of staff went so far as to testify that an airplane, like a beautiful woman, should reveal itself not completely but bit by bit. But artists’ impressions of the Stealth fighter and other suspected aircraft that appeared in magazines such as Popular Science had their highlights exaggerated, like the women in bomber-nose art, their shapes made fuller and more magical, and with magical light swelling and suffusing the shapes and saturating the colors.2

  These paintings stood in contrast to the spy photos and flying saucer snapshots, blurry and grainy like the telephoto images of sunbathing celebrities in European magazines—located somewhere between imagination and reality.

  The whole experience of snooping for stealth was about the means as well as the ends. It was as much about telephoto lenses, the big binoculars the stealthies called “hooters,” or the grainy green mystery images produced by night-vision equipment, as it was about any real craft.

  Jim Goodall, who had the declared ambition of collecting a picture of every airplane the U.S. Air Force had ever flown, complete with tail number—more than a hundred thousand pictures—claimed an almost sexual rush when he first saw the Stealth fighter in the winter of 1988. For a traveling salesman of computer equipment, he had a surprisingly sensual side, and was a sharp dancer in the Holiday Inn discos he visited on the road. Goodall was often joined on the fence line at Tonopah by John Andrews, the veteran plastic model designer for the Testor corporation. In 1986 Testor had released Andrews’s model of the Stealth fighter, called the “F-19” and based on his glimpses as well as reports from the other watchers. It was like putting together a police composite sketch of a wanted man, he said.

  The model set off a small storm in Washington. How could a model company know what America’s most closely guarded secret looked like, when our lawmakers themselves did not know? Of course, everyone in and around the black world knew that the last person to be briefed on a project of such high security was a congressman. You might as well just publish the specs in the Congressional Register. Angered and embarrassed, congressmen held hearings to find out how the shape of the plane had leaked. By one account, the Air Force had to bring a model of the real fighter to Capitol Hill in a locked box, handcuffed to a guard, to illustrate to them that Andrews’s model was wrong.

  But the Air Force and the Skunk Works could only say it was wrong, and not show it, unless they broke down the very secrecy designed to keep people like Andrews out.

  I drove east out of town toward the base. The road was lined with corrals and horse stables indistinguishable from houses, and old mines and piles of tailings. I passed a truck with a bumper sticker that advised IF IT DOESN’T GROW, IT HAS TO BE MINED.

  I was looking for the base, which did not appear on the maps. The old World War II main base is the civilian airport now. On the official Nevada state highway map I had picked up at the Forest Service, the whole area was vaguely named “game range.” Even the test site and the Nellis range were omitted.

  As the buildings thinned out and then stopped, the sight line shrank to a few hundred yards. The road was marked “Grand Army of the Republic Highway.” “Ely 163 miles,” I read, “next gas 112 miles.” Soon I saw it to the south: the old World War II base, now Tonopah Airport, with huge arched hangars and earthen bunkers suffused in the soft light seeping through the black clouds.

  I drove along the near deserted flight line. It seemed dark, almost haunted. It had been from the beginning a kind of hard-luck base. Trainees, suffering from the cold, the wind, and the dust, named it “Camp Frosty Balls” and died at alarming rates. After the base became the site of a B-24 training program, the bombers kept crashing, too. Once, a machine gun began firing inside one of the bombers, and when the crew finally got it on the ground, two men were dead in the turrets. By the end of the war they were testing bizarre bat bombs, crude radio-directed cruise missiles that foreshadowed the future of the base.

  By the time the Stealth arrived in 1984, the Tonopahans had learned the importance of noting the side upon which their bread was buttered. Their conspiracy of silence about the secret airplane was like that of a beach town at the height of the season when a shark is sighted. They paid no note to the airplanes flying overhead.

  Taking off at night, Stealth pilots, like SAC pilots before them, practice-bombed America in the dark, targeting boat docks in Minnesota and high-rises in Denver. “We could find Mrs. Smith’s rooming house and take out the northeast corner guest room above the garage,” one of the pilots boasted.

  Still, even those who had trained with the plane were not sure it would work against real radar. Before the Gulf War, the general sentiment among American pilots in Saudi Arabia was “I sure hope this Stealth shit works.” Then they saw the bats that showed up each morning dead on the floor of the hangars, their sonar fooled by the faceted shapes of the planes, just as radar would be, and they believed.

  On the night of January 17, 1991, a retirement banquet was held to honor Ben Rich. Halfway around the world, the F-117s were loading up to hit Baghdad.

  Soon they would be going after another target—the press. Peter Arnett of CNN, whose coverage was unbeloved by the Air Force, was using Baghdad’s phone center. The switchboard went on the target list, and one night, in the ready rooms at King Khalid Air Force Base, off-duty pilots waited expectantly, sets tuned to CNN. They counted down the seconds until, right on schedule, their screens suddenly went to a roaring gray and cheers broke out.

  By the time the war was over, the F-117 was a national hero, and the pictures were no longer distant and grainy. The Stealth was photographed by Annie Leibovitz, photograph
er of the stars, for Vanity Fair, in a portfolio together with Schwarzkopf and Powell and Cheney—war celebrities. Seeing the airplane there reminded me of those portraits of American Indian chiefs, hauled across the Atlantic to entertain the court in London, so strangely out of place. Stealth was now seen openly and it possessed the beauty of the jeep or humvee, or the pup tent or camouflage.

  The sort of claims the airpower advocates always like to make were now made for the F-117, that in just so many sorties the Stealth had done the work of the entire bomber fleet of World War II. It reminded me of Curt LeMay, bragging about the B-47 or the B-58.

  After the F-117 was made public, the locals could show their pride openly, and after the Gulf War, Tonopahans held a victory parade with a thousand people. I drove past the fire station, which bore a bas-relief of the fighter and a “Home of the Stealth” plaque.

  Yet as soon as the Stealth became a hero, it was gone. The whole wing of aircraft was transferred in 1992 to Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The base at Tonopah was too distant, and keeping the planes secret was too expensive.

  Back on the highway, I was soon spun into a cocoon of snow. As if by meteorological conspiracy, the whole place had locked down. I drove up to the fence, paused a reflective moment or two, then turned around.

  Back in town I stopped for coffee and cherry pie—$1.50 total—a few feet from the fire station. At the pay phone, I noticed a plaque on the wall that showed the outline of the state of Nevada with Iraq laid over it. In the center, roughly where Dreamland stood, Baghdad was neatly superimposed and marked by red flashes. “First to strike, January 1991,” the plaque stated proudly. I was confused about the scale: Was Iraq that small, or Nevada that large?

  On the fence line at Tonopah, the guards were usually polite and friendly enough, unlike the camou dudes at Freedom Ridge, but later the Interceptors discovered another viewpoint, which for obscure reasons they named Brainwash Butte. From there, you could see the base, but the view was not a very exciting one: The long row of identical hangars that had been built for the Stealth fighters looked from this distance like the little tin sheds of one of those U-Store-It rental facilities.

  Goodall was convinced something new was going on. The security was tighter than it had been during the height of the Stealth program, and new construction was under way. Goodall should have known. He had been venturing to the perimeter, both at Tonopah and Groom Lake, longer than nearly anyone—anyone except for a very strange man named John Lear.

  13. The Decentral Intelligence Agency; or, “Use of Deadly Farce Authorized”

  John Lear’s telephone answering machine does not give his name or number. But in his voice it offers the following: “To leave a message for Area 51, push one. To leave one for S-4, push two. The Tonopah Test Range is temporarily unavailable.”

  Lear comes on the line, fumbling. He has flown more than 160 types of aircraft in fifty countries, but he can’t figure out this damn machine and he jokes about it. Most often these days, Lear can be found in the Holiday Inns surrounding distant airports. A commercial pilot, he has had a hard time keeping a job since he became one of the most visible viewers of Dreamland and proponent of UFO theories.

  John Lear journeyed to Dreamland in a Detroit dream machine. In September 1978, he got behind the wheel of his Lincoln Mark IV and drove to the edge of Groom Lake. At that time, the perimeter still ran along the lake edge, and the mountains and road were still public land. Lear had long known about the base, about the U-2 and the Blackbird, and now he had heard rumors that something else was flying. Ahead of him, the rank of hangars that once held the Blackbirds were visible along with a few aircraft—a MiG on the flight line, a transport.

  He quickly snapped off a few photos and waited. “Then a half hour later this Klaxon goes off and we see a little trail of dust.” Two vehicles, heading his way. “I rolled the film up and put it in the ashtray of the Mark IV and put another roll in the camera and shot the same thing again. A black guy in a red car came up shouting, ‘What in the hell do you think you are doing?’ I decided to play it cool as possible. ‘So we’re not supposed to be here, right?’ I said.

  “Then I went into a whole line of BS. My dad did the autopilot for the U-2, and I’ve got a lot of good friends in the SR-71, and so on. I used to live near the airport in Burbank, and we would always see those three Constellations that went up here.”

  The guard calmed down. “Do you have film?” he asked. Lear pulled the film out of the camera and gave it to him.

  He promised not to intrude again and was allowed to leave. He promptly drove to Los Angeles, had his stashed film developed, and made big 18-by-20-inch prints. His black-and-white panorama of the base from across the dry lake, then covered with a thin layer of water, would become famous, although so many buildings have been added at Groom that today the picture makes the place seem crude and primitive.

  “Truth,” Lear once wrote. “I can’t tell you what the truth is … I’m not sure such a thing exists. If it does exist, the truth is hidden in an incredibly complex, labyrinthine hall of mirrors with floors of quicksand leading to truly frightening bizarre and awesome events which have been going on for billions of years, if not eternity.” John Lear’s writings are apocalyptic, almost hysterical, but in person or on the phone he is charming and reasonable.

  John Lear is the son of Bill Lear, the aviation pioneer who created some 150 major innovations in radio and control systems, along with the eight-track audiotape and the jet that bears his name.

  Born in 1942, before war work made his father rich, John was alternately spoiled and abused. From the age of twelve he could barely bring himself to speak to his father, and family meals terrified him. His father would begin by speaking tenderly but quickly rise to a harangue over some failure of John’s. Once Bill Lear, dismayed with John’s ducktail haircut, slapped him.

  The Lears spent a lot of time in Switzerland. Bill Lear nicknamed their estate there Le Ranch. John was rarely in any school for more than a year and was eventually sent to Le Rosey, the posh Swiss academy known as “the school of kings.”

  John Lear was obsessed with flying—perhaps because his father, for all he had contributed to aviation, held the lowest possible regard for those who actually flew planes for a living. He made his first flight at fourteen, in 1956, and got his license and soloed at sixteen. He immediately declared his intention to become a commercial pilot. He added twin engine, instrument, and aerobatics ratings. In December 1960 his father’s company, Lear International, hired him as a public relations representative and pilot.

  Then, on June 24, 1961, to get to Bern, Switzerland, on an errand, John rented a small yellow single-engine biplane from a flying club in Geneva. He had often made low wing-wagging passes over the dorm at Le Rosey in his Cessna, and now he came across again, ready to put on a show of aerobatics.

  Screaming like a rodeo cowboy to the students below, he began a three-turn spin at well under a thousand feet, intending to pull up just a few feet from the ground. After the second turn, with his nose pointed to the ground, he realized he was too low. He saw a barn out of the corner of his vision. He began to pull back on the stick, but the plane was still heading down at a 30-degree angle when it plowed into a wheat field, smashing him into the instrument panel and snapping the straps of his shoulder harness.

  Students pulled him from the wreck. In the ambulance, doctors performed an emergency tracheotomy. Lear’s larynx had been crushed. Both sides of his jaw were broken, four front teeth were gone, his heel bones and ankles were crushed, and each leg had been broken in three places. He spent five hours in surgery in a Geneva hospital and several days in intensive care. His father, angry and humiliated, came to the hospital immediately, but never returned during Lear’s long convalescence.

  In 1962, Lear agreed to attend Art Center College in Pasadena, but lost the $5,000 his father had given him for tuition on a stock tip. In 1964 he was part of a crew taking a Learjet on a round-the-w
orld flight. The crew went east, violating Indian airspace, making their longest leg—into Singapore—with only enough fuel for three minutes in the air. A MiG-17 shadowed them near the Kuril Islands, then flew off when one of the crew raised a camera with a telephoto lens and began shooting through the Plexiglas window.

  Bill Lear warmed to his son after that flight, but the breach was never really healed. His will was generous to John’s children—they got 15 percent of his fortune—but John was left out. At the funeral, John Lear cried uncontrollably. He eventually became a pilot for Air America—the CIA’s clandestine airline in Southeast Asia—as well as for domestic carriers.

  Growing up in California, Lear was aware of black programs; his father’s company supported some of them. He knew about planes that flew workers and equipment from Lockheed in Burbank to the Ranch. In the mid-seventies, Lear heard rumors from a reporter friend that more interesting things were going on at Groom Lake. In those days there was practically no security, and Lear was able to drive almost to the lake itself. “That’s when I took that famous picture of the lake bed.”

  After 1978, Lear became increasingly fascinated with UFOs. He would eventually drop out of MUFON because the organization wasn’t hard-core enough for him. He grew close to those who searched for black aircraft, but also to the UFO believers. In 1987 he published his “Darkside” thesis, the most extreme view of the dark dangers of aliens, full of tales of secret treaties with the aliens and their need for human and cattle bodies.

  Lear came to believe it all—the underground bases, the tanks with aliens and alien-human hybrids, the bases on the moon and Mars, MJ-12 and the secret treaties. He even went on record as believing George Adamski, the early contactee.