Dreamland

by Phil Patton

  He claimed that aliens mutilated cattle to extract a special enzyme. “The secretions obtained are then mixed with hydrogen peroxide and applied on the skin by spreading or dipping parts of their bodies in the solution. The body absorbs the solution, then excretes the waste back through the skin. The cattle mutilations … were for the collection of these tissues by the aliens.”

  At the Ultimate UFO Conference in Rachel in 1993, Lear declared, “In 1979, our alliance with the aliens became a disaster … Forty-four U.S. scientists and approximately sixty-six members of Delta Force security personnel were killed by the aliens in an altercation at a jointly occupied U.S.-alien base north of Los Alamos, New Mexico … The exact cause of the altercation is not known, but the cause of death was listed as external head wounds. This effectively terminated the alien alliance for an indefinite time.”

  The gray aliens of the Lore were simply robots working for a race of aliens that resembled praying mantises. The government had tried to prepare the public for release of information on the secret treaties by sponsoring such films as E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but then relations went sour. MJ-12 was in disarray and confusion. It was time for the truth to come out, Lear cried.

  Lear’s transformation struck many among the Interceptors as suspicious. He had worked for the CIA in Southeast Asia. He knew many of the Interceptors. He had introduced Bob Lazar to the newsman George Knapp, who publicized his story. Lear kept popping up in the stories about Area 51, smack between the stealthies and the youfers, working each way. It was easy to see a scenario where he was a disinformationist. He had, after all, worked for Air America. But Lear loved to fly; he would fly for anyone.

  Yet another explanation seemed more convincing. “He has no bullshit filter,” one of the Interceptors has said. He was both totally credulous and totally suspicious: Lear never met a plot he didn’t like.

  Today Lear no longer wants to get the story out. He doesn’t think the public is ready. Those who are keeping it all secret know what they are doing. John Lear, who once challenged the government to come clean, now thinks they may be right. Yes, he says, there may be disinformation. There may be government influence in the media. Look at all the films on UFOs. He doesn’t even trust supermarket tabloids. Somehow they get information early. They manage to take the kernel of truth and distort it just enough to make it look ridiculous.

  Was that, I wondered, the case with a story like the one headlined, TOP SECRET: U.S. HOLDING NAZI WAR CRIMINALS IN SECRET AREA 51 IN NEVADA—AS SLAVE SCIENTISTS TO BUILD WEAPONS! I went away shaking my head. I had never thought to suspect that the government might control the Weekly World News.

  The first time they climbed Whitesides Mountain to survey Area 51, Jim Goodall thought Lear would never make it because he has flat feet. But Lear carried the sixty-pound pack all the way, and Goodall was the one who had the hard time.

  Goodall may have been the most fervent of the Interceptors. As I had, he had grown up in the shadow of the SAC B-36.

  One evening in the summer of 1951, when he was five years old, Goodall felt his father shaking him awake. There’s something you’ve got to see, his father told him. Young Jim went outside and heard the rumble of two dozen B-36s and saw their shadows—“aluminum overcast.” He was fascinated. When the family moved to the San Francisco area, he found his way to airplanes again. He once sat in the prototype XF-104 Starfighter in a wind tunnel in Sunnyvale and managed to close the canopy. Even as a kid he knew enough to be careful of what lever he pulled; he knew there was such a thing as an ejection seat. Another characteristic of his personality was already forming: He talked his way out of trouble.

  He joined the Air Force in March 1962, and in February 1964 he was at Edwards working on a communications system. President Johnson had just made the existence of the Blackbird public, and Goodall saw his first, a YF-12. He still remembers the date—February 29, 1964. “I was about to get on the Northrop shuttle to Hawthorne when I heard this incredible roar and ran down to the flight-line area and looked to the south.”

  There Goodall saw a black airplane that he at first thought was the famous X-15 rocket plane, but from the scale of the people standing beside it he realized it was a larger craft. The little prop shuttle took off and it flew right over the taxiing YF-12. The moment he saw the Blackbird framed in the window beneath him, he realizes now, he imprinted on it like some infant animal. He was locked in to the fascination of his life. “I could not believe my eyes,” he remembered later. “At that point I became obsessed.”

  After he got out of the Air Force, he would split time between selling computer hardware on the road and serving in the Air National Guard in Minnesota. As unit historian, he managed to persuade the Air Force to provide him with an old Blackbird for the group’s museum. It was an A-12, an agency plane, and Goodall made it the most meticulously restored and maintained Blackbird in the world. In time, Goodall was admitted to the Roadrunner’s Club, whose members had worked on the U-2 or the Blackbirds between 1955 and 1968 at the Ranch.

  He has calculated that he’s spent some eighty days on the perimeter—twice the time Jesus spent in the desert—on Whitesides and Freedom Ridge, then by the fence line at Tonopah, looking for the Stealth fighter, and later at Brainwash Butte. He would take one of the first clear pictures of the F-117.

  By the time he went up to Whitesides to look down on Dreamland for the first time with John Lear in the fall of 1988, his obsession had expanded. At some point during the revelation of the Lazar story, and talking to those who had worked at the base, Goodall crossed the Ridge—or began to straddle it. He came to believe in the presence of alien craft, as did John Andrews, his frequent companion on the trips. “There are things out there that would make George Lucas green with envy,” he had been told, and he believed.

  The key moment in his conversion was a letter Ben Rich had written to him, in which Rich said that both he and Kelly Johnson believed in UFOs. (But in the account I had, this was a tease.) Goodall talked often with Rich, who respected him as a true buff, someone who saw that what the Skunk Works had done was important history. Rich even appreciated the efforts of Goodall and the others to get the story out; as he grew older, he saw that the whole system of secrecy had grown more and more onerous. Rich now felt that it was out of hand, and he once compared the Interceptors to Ross Perot, shrilly crying for a change in a system gone wrong.

  Goodall had come to believe in the saucers. Something, he wasn’t sure what, had happened at Roswell. He could believe most of Lazar’s story. Perhaps Lear—as always, a central figure, the key link—had influenced him, but what for most of the Interceptors was just an intriguing possibility became a certainty for Goodall.

  It did not reduce his interest in black craft. He was still into every detail of every possible project. He became the butt of gentle jokes about his constant obsession with “something new at Tonopah.” He would hide under camou net for days and come back reporting that security was tighter than during the Stealth deployment and that some new craft must be flying. But he was not able to pin down what craft.

  John Andrews was constantly enraging the people at the Skunk Works. The very mention of his name, and his constant letters of inquiry, sent Ben Rich fairly raving. Kelly Johnson had been outraged when he learned in the early eighties that Andrews had been allowed to photograph and measure the D-21 Blackbird drones in storage at the boneyard at Davis-Monthan—the same strange shape I was told I did not see.

  In 1959 he knew all about the U-2 and contacted Lockheed, but he honored the company’s request not to produce a model. Only in 1962 was a miniature U-2 released by Hawk Models in Chicago.

  When Andrews was pursuing the Stealth fighter, an AFOSI officer flew out from Washington and told him, “Just be patient.” Andrews expects AFOSI to keep an eye on him; it’s their job. But today, Andrews feels, “things have changed. Once it was man to man. Now they are hiding behind regulations.”

  When his model of the Stealt
h fighter, billed as the “F-19,” appeared in 1986, it became the best-selling plastic aircraft model of all time, with a million sold, and it is now highly sought by collectors. Although Andrews estimates its dimensions were accurate to about 2 percent of the real thing, and 75 percent accurate in shape, in fact it turned out to more closely resemble the speculative Russian Stealth fighter, the experimental MiG Ferret. But some of the buffs, who had long imagined the craft, would later say it looked more like the idea of Stealth than the real one.

  Andrews was unapologetic. “The model helped keep the security of the airplane, because everybody was looking at it, saying, That’s what it looks like.”

  “But,” I interposed, “what if you had been more accurate?”

  He had no answer.

  Andrews next turned out his model of the long-rumored “Aurora” spy plane, with its pulser engine. This came directly from his visits to the perimeter. “I’ve slept on the top of Whitesides,” he said, “and heard the pulser in December 1992. You cannot mistake it. It has a very low frequency; there’s nothing like it.”

  To some of the Interceptors, though, the appearance of the Testor company’s Lazar saucer showed that Andrews had crossed the line.

  “I’m quite comfortable with Lazar,” Andrews has said, and he seems to believe most of Lazar’s story. He’d consulted with Lazar and Jon Farhat, a computer graphic designer who was working on the long-gestating film about Lazar, in the development of the model.

  Andrews’s model of the Lazar saucer was skillfully packaged so that no one could tell just how seriously it was intended. “Area S4 UFO Revealed!” ran the copy on the box. “A scale model kit of the alien craft allegedly hidden in Nevada by the U.S. Government as described by eyewitness and former government physicist, Bob Lazar.” Paint and cement not included. Skill Level Two. Sixteen-page full-color book included. “Type of vehicle: Anti-matter reaction, gravity amplification, interstellar craft. Made of metallic substance of unknown nature, containing an antimatter reactor to bend space-time, fueled by element 115.” Rendered in 1/48 scale, it was made up of twenty-three plastic pieces, including a transparent top to offer a view of the antimatter reactor. Testor also carefully stated on the box that “we can neither confirm nor deny” the existence of the craft on which the model is based.

  It was the saucer Lazar had nicknamed “the sport model,” and it sold out immediately, thanks perhaps to the fact that Larry King displayed the model on his desk during the October 1994 program he filmed from outside Area 51.

  The Testor model made Lazar’s tale tangible. Once one had seen such detailed plastic parts, it was harder not to believe in the existence of the real craft. Andrews seemed to buy into the “trickle out” theory—all those bits and pieces, they were what the government wanted us to know, so we would be less shocked when the whole truth comes out.

  As Andrews’s interest in flying saucers grew, his letters to Ben Rich and others at the Skunk Works irritated them even more. Then Rich finally sent Andrews and Goodall that letter in which he admitted, “Yes, I believe in UFOs, and so did Kelly Johnson.

  “Yes,” Rich continued, “I call them UnFunded Opportunities”—in other words, Lockheed ideas the damn fool Air Force wouldn’t pay for. It was a joke, and not a kind one.

  After he finished the Stealth fighter model, Andrews began to hike up Whitesides Mountain, sometimes with Lear and Goodall. Now he was looking for Aurora, or whatever it was that left the doughnut-on-a-rope contrails. After PsychoSpy moved to Rachel and began to publicize the viewpoints, the numbers of viewers grew. As in complexity theory, the first individuals evolved into a self-organizing group of watchers who would later call themselves the Dreamland Interceptors. The name was taken from the Intercepts newsletter Steve Douglass published for the secret-aircraft buffs and military monitors who eavesdropped on aircraft radios on their scanners.

  Andrews, having watched black planes since the days of the U-2 and having been out on the perimeter since 1988, came to be viewed as the most veteran and venerable of the Interceptors. “It’s like a little CIA out there,” he said. “We collect bits and pieces and put them together in a mosaic.”

  The Interceptors developed their own loose camaraderie and culture over the course of many visits. As their totem, the Interceptors adopted the aluminum lawn chair—that icon of suburban backyard America. It was one thing to say you had seen the base—everyone somehow seemed to feel, doing it, that they were among the first, the proud, the few—but the real badge of honor was to carry that chair up there.

  USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED, read the signs on the perimeter, citing the Internal Security Act of 1950—also known notoriously as the McCarran Act, named, as is the airport in Las Vegas, for Nevada senator Pat McCarran, although it was promoted and written mostly by then Congressman Richard Nixon and Senator Karl Mundt. It struck me as appropriate to think of Richard Nixon writing the perimeter warnings.

  The law’s language includes one of the clearest and most specific statements of the outlook and assumptions of the Cold Warrior:

  There exists a world Communist movement which in its origins, its development, and its present practice, is a world-wide revolutionary movement whose purpose it is, by treachery, deceit, infiltration into other groups (governmental and otherwise), espionage, sabotage, terrorism, and any other means deemed necessary, to establish a Communist totalitarian dictatorship in the countries throughout the world through the medium of a world-wide Communist organization.

  Before Glenn Campbell discovered Freedom Ridge in 1993, the best view of Dreamland was from Whitesides Mountain; farther away, after Freedom Ridge fell victim to the expansion of the perimeter, there was Tikaboo. Tikaboo became the agreed-upon standard for the measurement of the height of other peaks, the strenuousness of other hikes, and in planning expeditions to observe the base at Tonopah, the nuclear test site, miscellaneous mysterious electronic stations, and sites of aircraft wreckage. Visitors speculated on areas they could not reach, such as the fabled Cheshire airstrip, which was said to remain invisible until special lights were turned on. Or Base Camp, a mysterious facility north of Warm Springs and Highway 6, or Site IV, deep in between Tonopah and the restricted area around Groom. It was the home, Agent X reported, “of terrain-following radar development, covert testing of purloined Soviet, Warsaw Pact, and Chinese radars and ECM … making sure that they wouldn’t jam fuses on our nuclear weapons and disable our penetrating bombers’ electronic navigation and countermeasures. It seems to be an integral part of the Nellis Range Complex electronic warfare and evaluation capabilities along with the Tolicha Peak Electronic Combat Range.”

  The mock spies—“a little CIA”—and the jesters of Dreamland watched the reliquary of the Cold War with whimsy and cynicism. They wore the same camou as the camou dudes. They reminded me of Marx’s famous statement that history happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Their production was a send-up of the Cold War; their spirit like that suggested on the old Firesign Theatre album cover bearing the revolutionary banners of Marx (Groucho) and Lennon (John).

  Of course they were also just another of those self-directing American groups Tocqueville had observed, revealing a nation of joiners and near-obsessives. I recognized myself in them: We had been the kids who put together too many aircraft models and spent our time at the library looking at Aviation Week instead of reading the Hardy Boys.

  Among them were journalists and buffs, private researchers and conservationists. Peter Merlin, an aviation archaeologist, found the crash sites of old planes in the desert and ferreted out details and documents. He carried a key ring made of bits of famous planes he’d found. Tom Mahood, the former civil engineer from Irvine, spent days assembling careful chronologies and descriptions of secret places like the radar cross-section facilities. He collated official brochures about Tonopah and studied old maps.

  Agent X, a former Coast Guard agent and reporter for such magazines as Gung Ho and The Nose, came from hi
s home in Juneau, Alaska, and spent days driving around the perimeters in rented convertibles turned into makeshift off-road vehicles. The cars usually came back to the rental agency in appalling shape. Once Agent X wrecked a Buick LeSabre on a cutoff from Groom Road, sliding into a ditch doing 60 miles per hour. His report made it sound like a crash of some exotic secret prototype: “The LeSabre rose in a 45-degree left roll before hanging for a moment and falling back to the desert floor.”

  The Interceptors had no clubhouse or Raccoon Lodge. Their social organization could be described as ad hoc. They had no regular or official membership and only the most general of shared values and beliefs. They were against excess secrecy, but without the mystery they wouldn’t have been on the perimeter.

  Some derided the youfers, some were curious and tentative, and for many the saucers stories were a little pilot flame of possibility that kept them all going—the Biggest Story in the History of Mankind. “I’m a hardware guy,” Jim Goodall said, but he was willing to speculate on the existence of extraterrestrial hardware.

  Many of the Interceptors admitted that people with more vital social and personal lives did not end up hanging around the perimeter. Some saw looking for airplanes or secret saucer bases as just another way to get outdoors, camp, get some fresh air.

  There were those who would fly in light planes around the perimeter, an enterprise that felt daring and exciting but offered very little new perspective or information. They visited places like Mount Charleston, where the wreckage of the C-54 that crashed in 1955 on its way to Groom Lake still lay tangled. The circle of the Interceptors widened. In August 1994, some sixty people mustered on the Ridge for what was billed as Groomstock, which included a former pilot from the Blackbird program and UFO buffs.