Dreamland

by Phil Patton

  The SEALs crept up on the Interceptors, but they were clearly visible on the Interceptors’ night-vision scopes and clearly audible on the scanners. Every time the SEALs moved up a little bit, the Interceptors lit them with a laser. It was Radio Shack versus the Pentagon, and it was no contest.

  Finally, the SEALs got disgusted and radioed for a humvee to pick them up. One of the Interceptors had an idea and got on a cell phone. A few minutes later, a Domino’s delivery vehicle pulled up to the humvee parked back on the perimeter and delivered two large ones, pepperoni and cheese. The anchovies were the final insult.

  Just as Bob Lazar’s story held a fascination that grew even as it seemed less and less likely to be true, the Roswell story was drawing more attention the further it receded into the past. When Steve and I visited the town, it was on the verge of a new saucer boom.

  A mayor was elected who decided to make lemonade from what respectable townspeople had hitherto viewed as a lemon. He put a saucer on his official stationery, and promoted the town as a saucer tourist site. “Why don’t you drop in?” the brochures read. “After all, THEY might have.”

  James Moseley, the acerbic publisher of Saucer Smear, commented in 1996 that “the Roswell incident has emerged as a myth of such power and allure that it is no longer in anybody’s best interest to seek—or admit—the truth.”

  What made the Roswell story special was that it marked the only time the U.S. government ever officially claimed to have captured a flying saucer. The press release from Roswell Army Air Field came on July 8, 1947:

  The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the wreckage …

  “Fortunate,” “cooperation”—the studied casualness of the vocabulary made the acquisition sound like a bequest to a museum.

  The man who issued the press release—on orders from his boss, Gen. William “Butch” Blanchard, head of the 509th Bomb Group—was public information officer Lt. Walter Haut. Haut, interviewed years later, declared he had never seen the wreckage, or visited the crash site. At first, he didn’t really think it was a flying saucer, but by the 1980s he did.

  The 509th was the special unit that had dropped the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and, the year before, had bombed Eniwetok. In 1947, it was the only unit in the world capable of dropping atomic weapons, although there were still precious few of them in the U.S. arsenal. Blanchard was a top bombardier who had trained in the secret range near Wendover, Utah. Had his bomb scores been a few points higher, he might have pushed the button himself over Hiroshima.

  Haut would attribute Blanchard’s apparent eagerness to issue the press release to his long-standing interest in good community relations. Butch Blanchard carefully doled out news from the base evenhandedly between the two newspapers and two radio stations of Roswell. On July 8, 1947, the Roswell Daily Record, the local afternoon paper, ran the following story:

  RAAF CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER ON RANCH IN ROSWELL REGION

  No Details of Flying Disk Are Revealed Roswell Hardware Man and Wife Report Disk Seen

  The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment Group at Roswell Army Field announced at noon today that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer. According to information released by the department, over authority of Maj. J. A. Marcel, intelligence officer, the disk was recovered on a ranch in the Roswell vicinity, after an unidentified rancher had notified Sheriff Geo. Wilcox, here, that he had found the instrument on his premises. Major Marcel and a detail from the base went to the ranch and recovered the disk, it was stated. After the intelligence officer here had inspected the instrument it was flown to higher headquarters.

  The headlines did not last long. The wreckage was flown to the headquarters of the Eighth Air Force in Fort Worth, where the commanding general, Roger Ramey, declared the “instrument” to be a weather balloon. Only afternoon papers and one round of the eastern morning papers carried the story before the press release was “withdrawn.”

  Haut was dispatched to retrieve copies of the release from the local newspapers and radio stations, although he denied later reports that he had been ordered to do so directly by the Pentagon. And neither his career nor Blanchard’s seem to have suffered for their embarrassing haste.

  The New York Times treated the story on its front page on Wednesday July 9, 1947: ‘DISC’ NEAR BOMB TEST SITE IS JUST A WEATHER BALLOON—emphasizing the proximity of Alamogordo, a hundred miles away. ‘FLYING SAUCER’ TALES POUR IN FROM ROUND THE WORLD.

  Walter Haut’s named was mangled as “Warren Haught,” and the story made Irving Newton, the weather man in Ramey’s office, the hero for identifying the wreckage as a weather balloon. But there was enough publicity to keep the phones in Roswell ringing for a week or so.

  A crestfallen Daily Record the next day reported, RAMEY EMPTIES ROSWELL SAUCER, and HARASSED RANCHER WHO LOCATED “SAUCER” SORRY HE TOLD ABOUT IT. After the affair had faded, the newspaper ran an editorial that implicitly set the whole thing in the context of the wider saucer obsession and the nation’s mood with regard to atomic weapons and international tensions. The end of the war was supposed to allow Americans to come home. Instead, the beginning of the Cold War had drawn the country into world issues seemingly without resolution. Victory was no longer a goal.

  By the early eighties, Roswell had resurfaced. Now it was not just a sighting, it had a plot—a story. Or it was a plot—a cover-up. There had been hundreds of flying saucer sightings in the summer of 1947, but Roswell had the elements of a great one. The tale was appealingly simple and dramatic: A couple of days after a violent thunderstorm, during which he hears another sort of boom amid the thunder, an old sheep rancher comes across mysterious wreckage in one of his fields—metal that won’t dent, parchment that won’t tear, something like balsa wood that won’t break, and mysterious writing. He has no phone. He finally makes it to the feed-and-seed town of Roswell and tells the sheriff, who sends him to the Army Air Field base. Two men come to investigate: an intelligence officer and a counterintelligence man. They spend the night in a shack, dining on cold beans and crackers, then rise at dawn to recover the wreckage. There is too much to fit in their old Buick and Jeep carry-all. Soon, troops appear and the area is cordoned off for full recovery. The rancher goes incommunicado for several days, then returns home taciturn but with a new pickup truck. The Air Force ships plane and bodies to Wright Field in Dayton for analysis, issues a press release, and then withdraws it. The FBI stops a wire-service transmission in midsentence, and other government agents intimidate witnesses until all publicity vanishes.

  The scenario was perfect: the mysterious shiny object in the desert, the grizzled and baffled rancher, the swift deployment of the military, the hush-hush ferrying of mysterious wreckage to secret labs, the cover-up. The wreckage bore mysterious symbols or signs or letters—hieroglyphic, they were called, “like Japanese or Chinese.” It was made for the movies.

  Roswell also offered a wonderful cast of characters, from Jesse Marcel to Mac Brazel; the stock sheriff, George Wilcox; and, among the witnesses who would surface later, Pappy Henderson, the old pilot who gave testimony to his friend the dentist. There was Sheridan Cavitt, the closemouthed CIC agent, and the nurse who attended the autopsies and then vanished—there were rumors of a fatal plane crash, rumors she was in a convent on the outskirts of Roswell. And don’t forget the teletype operator named Lydia Sleppy, who described the FBI interrupting her dispatch of the press release.

  The world of ufology is as racked by jealousy and inbreeding as any academic discipline ever dreamed of being. It has its fads and fashions, its hot areas and its backwaters. UFO researchers, lik
e professors of English Romantic poetry or biochemistry, have to find the right topics if they are to flourish on the lecture tour and in the publishing world.

  The specialty called “crash recovery” was, in the seventies, a highly unfashionable and suspect realm of the rivalrous and quarrelsome world of the youfers. It had lain in the shadows since the early fifties, when Frank Scully, author of Behind the Flying Saucers, had been duped by a couple of con men into believing he was in possession of flying saucer wreckage, which turned out to be profoundly terrestrial pot-and-pan-grade aluminum.

  By the late seventies, a UFO researcher named Len Stringfield had found his own niche of credibility, gathering hard evidence about crashes and lining up witnesses. Soon he was a prominent figure on the UFO lecture circuit. He was the first to focus again on Roswell and the recovered wreckage.

  Sensing Stringfield was on to a good thing, William Moore and Charles Berlitz, whose previous success had been a book about the Bermuda Triangle, joined with UFO researcher Stanton Friedman in 1980 to publish The Roswell Incident, which brought the story back to the forefront. Books by other investigators followed, each adding witnesses and in some cases new, secondary crash sites. In 1989 the Showtime cable network broadcast a film on the case. Roswell came to be the touchstone of the cover-up theory.

  The key new witness to emerge was intelligence officer Jesse Marcel, who before his death in 1992 told Friedman of going out to the crash site, near Corona, about fifty miles north of Roswell, with CIC agent Cavitt and collecting pieces of wreckage.

  Marcel would later be photographed in the Fort Worth office of General Ramey with parts of the wreckage laid across the office chairs. Ramey had declared the wreckage to be that of a weather balloon—but Marcel knew it was “not of this world.”

  A key element of the new version of the story was a second crash site, near St. Augustin, New Mexico. Did General Blanchard use his “leave,” beginning July 8, to visit this second crash site? Why did Air Force chief of staff Nathan Twining cancel an important trip to the West Coast on July 8? In 1992, Gen. Thomas DuBose (in 1947 a colonel and Ramey’s chief of staff) testified shortly before his death that he had received a telephone call from Gen. Clements McMullen at Andrews Army Air Field in Washington, D.C., instructing Ramey to concoct a “cover story” to “get the press off our backs.” In 1990, retired general Arthur E. Exon, who had been stationed at Wright Patterson, described the testing there of the Roswell crash debris. The tests included “everything from chemical analysis, stress tests, compression tests, flexing. It was brought into our material evaluation labs. [Some of it] could be easily ripped or changed … there were other parts of it that were very thin but awfully strong and couldn’t be dented with heavy hammers … the overall consensus was that the pieces were from space.”

  In 1994, after prodding by New Mexico congressman Steven Schiff, the General Accounting Office was assigned the task of ferreting out the truth about Roswell.

  But on September 8, 1994, before the report could be completed, the Air Force issued its first official statement on Roswell in forty-seven years—a twenty-three-page report stating that the “most likely” source of the Roswell debris was a balloon from a secret program known as Project Mogul. The purpose of Project Mogul was to detect Soviet nuclear tests by using sensitive instruments carried aloft by high-altitude balloons.

  In July 1995, the General Accounting Office released a report based on its search for any government documents about the Roswell crash. It forthrightly declared, “In our search for records concerning the Roswell crash, we learned that some government records covering RAAF (Roswell Army Air Field) activities had been destroyed and others had not.” Exactly which had been destroyed and why was not made clear.

  The youfers found it suspicious that not only was there no mention at the time of the incident in the Roswell base newspaper The Atomic Blast, but that the official Air Force investigation into UFO sightings, Project Blue Book, did not mention it either. To them the very absence of information meant the presence of something important.

  In the Roswell revival, the old mysteries of “Hangar 18” at Wright-Pat, where the debris had supposedly been taken, expanded into a larger, much vaguer pattern. The newest scenarios had B-29s, B-25s, and C-54s dispersing bodies and wreckage in all directions. The element of the story that would tie Roswell to Dreamland was what I thought of as “the Dispersal.” In the initial story, the Air Force said that the wreckage had been taken to Fort Worth, then sent on to Wright-Pat. With retelling and new witnesses, and especially with the addition of bodies, the tale of Wright Patterson Air Force Base evolved into one about that base’s Hangar 18, a ghostly facility where many saucers and bodies would be stored. Other delivery sites were added: Los Alamos, Sandia, Edwards, McDill or Eglin Air Force bases in Florida, even Indian Springs—and Area 51. In time, Area 51 would become the equivalent of Hangar 18, writ large.

  Among the new Roswell witnesses who seemed to show up every few months was a man named Frank Kaufman, who had worked at the base in 1947. Appearing in yet another television documentary about the crash, he was a hard-faced man who described having taken part in the recovery of a saucer that was about twenty-five feet long. It had split open in the crash, and alien bodies were recovered. Kaufman had even submitted an official report, he said, with a drawing of the craft. When I caught sight of it, I jumped: It looked a little like a flying saucer, but it looked even more like Steve’s Black Manta.

  The plastic model of the saucer released by Testor in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the incident was based on drawings “forensically composited,” in the company’s phrase, from interviews with Kaufman and others conducted by one William Louis McDonald, who had been brought in by John Andrews. Kaufman described the craft as “Stealth-bomber-like”—an example, the Air Force would have said, of the seepage of subsequent impressions into earlier memories that figured in Air Force rebuttals of Roswell witnesses.

  With an elongated, raylike body whose edges curled up to form fins or tail, the model craft suggested a crossbreed between saucer and secret airplane, a bastard offspring of the two watcher cultures.

  As the Roswell myth grew—and while two academic anthropologists, Benson Saler and Charles Ziegler, analyzed its different versions with the thoroughness of a Lévi-Strauss or Franz Boas—the dispersal of the wreckage traced a direct line in the Lore from Roswell to Dreamland, a line that began as a faint thread of rumor in the eighties and grew to the bold stroke of legend in the nineties.

  15. “Redlight” and “MJ”

  The road from Roswell to Dreamland was long and circuitous, paved with much speculation and mysterious code names. The name “Redlight,” stenciled on shipping crates, marked the first important public connection of Area 51 to flying saucers.

  In April 1980 a witness named “Mike,” who claimed to be a former employee at Groom Lake, told a representative of MUFON, one of the larger and most influential UFO organizations, that he had caught a glimpse of the crates when he worked at the base between 1961 and 1963. Later, he saw a flying saucer and learned that Project Redlight was the name of a secret program for testing the saucers that had continued until 1962. Mike’s story was in part corroborated by radar operators at Tonopah, who around the same time had reported seeing very fast blips on their screens.

  The A-12—the original Blackbird, the CIA’s version of the airplane—had first flown in 1962. Had Mike only reported the inevitable result of secrecy, the scuttlebutt that grew out of compartmentalized information, the speculations inspired by a few astoundingly real details of a very fast aircraft?

  The first time the American public at large ever heard the word “Dreamland” was on the evening of October 14, 1988, when it was uttered on the Fox network’s television program UFO Cover-up? Live! Two “inside informants” were presented in disguise, code-named Falcon and Condor. Condor described Project Aquarius, an effort to make contact with extraterrestrials, and Snowbird, another program begun in
1972 and still being carried out in Nevada at “an area called Area 51, or Dreamland.” “The extraterrestrials,” Condor said, “have complete control of this base,” the result of an agreement between the government and the aliens that had gone awry. And in what became the most memorable and derided phrase of the show, Condor went on to describe the aliens here on earth, saying, “they enjoy music … especially ancient Tibetan–style music … the favorite dish or snack is ice cream—especially strawberry.”

  Condor, many in the UFO world concluded, was actually a man named Richard Doty, a special agent at the Kirtland AFB unit of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). In September 1980, Doty had written a report concerning a series of unidentified lights seen over the Kirtland range, near Albuquerque and the Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage Facility.

  He was aware of a man named Paul Bennewitz, who believed that aliens were not only actively flying over the range but had implanted human abductees with control devices. Bennewitz claimed to have electronically picked up the signals that activated these devices and to be in communication with aliens inside their craft. Doty was said to have provided him with disinformation, encouraging his speculations, including a memo analyzing Bennewitz’s sightings, which seemed to lend them credence—and prove that AFOSI was watching the saucer watchers as well.

  Bennewitz, a mild-mannered Albuquerque businessman, would end up chain-smoking and sleepless, with knives and guns stashed around his house, fearing spies and intruders. Finally, he had to be hospitalized for exhaustion.